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PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

International Library of Philosophy
and Scientific Method

EDITOR: TED HONDERICH
ADVISORY EDITOR: BERNARD WILLIAMS

INDUCTIVE PROBABILITY by John Patrick Day.

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION: A History of the Philosophy of Perception
by D. W. Hamlyn.

TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logiscb-
philosophische Abhandhmg with a new Translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuin-
ness and with the Introduction by Bertrand Russell.

PERCEPTION AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD by D. M. Armstrong.

HUME’S PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF : A Study of His First Inquiry by Antony
Flew.

KANT’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: An Outline of One Central Argument
in the Critique of Pure Reason by Graham Bird.

CONDITIONS FOR DESCRIPTION by Peter Zinkernagel, translated from the

Danish by Olaf Lindum.

I. M.

Wi. VAliL/lVt

volumes. I : Plato on Man and Society. II : Plato on Knowledge and Reality.
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION by M. Merleau-Ponty, translated from
the French by Colin Smith.

THE IDEA OF JUSTICE AND THE PROBLEM OF ARGUMENT by Ch.

Perelman, translated from the French by John Petrie.

LECTURES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH by C. D. Broad. Incorporating the
Perrott Lectures given in Cambridge University in 1959 and 1960.

THE VARIETIES OF GOODNESS by Georg Henrik von Wright.

METHOD IN ETHICAL THEORY by Abraham Edel.

METHOD IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES by G. Schlesinger.

SCIENCE, PERCEPTION AND REALITY by Wilfrid Sellars.

NORM AND ACTION : A Logical Enquiry by Georg Henrik von Wright.
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM by J. J. C. Smart.

STUDIES IN METAPHILOSOPHY by Morris Lazerowitz.

REASON, ACTION AND MORALITY by J. Kemp.

THE HIDDEN GOD : A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensdes of Pascal and the
Tragedies of Racine by Lucien Goidmann, trans. from the French by P. Thody.
THE EXPLANATION OF BEHAVIOUR by Charles Taylor.

THE STRATIFICATION OF BEHAVIOUR: A System of Definitions Pro¬
pounded and Defended by D. S. Shwayder.

STUDIES IN PLATO’S METAPHYSICS edited by R. E. Allen.

NEW ESSAYS ON PLATO AND ARISTOTLE edited by Renford Bambrough.
POLITICAL ARGUMENT by Brian M. Barry.

BRAIN AND MIND : Modern Concepts of the Nature of Mind edited by J. R.
Smythies.

BRITISH ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY edited by Bernard VTlliams and Alan

Montefiore,

PHENOMENOLOGY

OF PERCEPTION

M. Merleau-Ponty

translated from the French by

Colin Smith

LONDON

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL

NEW YORK: THE HUMANITIES PRESS

Translated from the French

PH^NOMENOLOGIE DE LA PERCEPTION

First Published in England 1962
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London, E.CA

Second Impression 1965
Third Impression 1966

Printed in Great Britain by
Compton Printing Works ( London ) Ltd.
London, N. 1

English translation

No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism

(' -M'; !

CONTENTS

R-cfaee pag€ vii

INTRODUCTION: TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES
AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

1 The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience 3

2 ‘Association’ and the ‘Projection of Memories’ 13

3 ‘Attention’ and ‘Judgement’ 26

4 The Phenomenal Field 52

PART ONE: THE BODY

Experience and objective thought. The problem of the body 67

1 The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology 73

2 The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology 90

3 The Spatiality of One’s own Body and Motility 98

4 The Synthesis of One’s own Body 148

5 The Body in its Sexual Being 154

6 The Body as Expression, and Speech 174

PART TWO: THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED
The theory of the body is already a theory of perception 203

1 Sense Experience 207

2 Space 243

3 The Thing and the Natural World 299

4 Other People and the Human World 346

PART THREE: BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND
BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

1 The Cogito 369

2 Temporality 410

3 Freedom 434

Bibliography 457

Index 463

PREFACE

WHAT is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question
has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The
fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology
is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to
finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence
of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philo¬
sophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to
arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting
point other than that of their ‘facticity’. It is a transcendental philo¬
sophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the
natural attitude, the better to understand them; but it is also a philo¬
sophy for which the world is always 'already there’ before reflection
begins — as'an inalienable presence ; and all its efforts are concentrated
upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and „
endowing that contact with a philosophical status. It is the search for
a philosophy which shall be a ‘rigorous science’, but it also offers an
account of space, time and the world as we ‘live’ them. It tries to give
a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account
of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the
scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able lo provide, Yet
Husserl in his last works mentions a ‘genetic phenomenology’,1 and
even a ‘constructive phenomenology’.2 One may try to do away with
these contradictions by making a distinction between Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s phenomenologies; yet the whole of Sew undZeit springs
from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an
explicit account of the ‘natiirlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Le bens welt’
which Husserl, towards the end of his life, identified as the central
theme of phenomenology, with the result that the contradiction re¬
appears in Husserl’s own philosophy. The reader pressed for time will
be inclined to give up the idea of covering a doctrine which says
everything, and will wonder whether a philosophy which cannot
define its scope deserves all the discussion which has gone on around
it, and whether he is not faced rather by a myth or a fashion.

1 Meditations car tries, pp, 1 20 IT,

1 See the unpublished 6th Meditation cartesienne , edited by Eugen Fink, to
which G. Berger has kindly referred us,

vii

PREFACE

Even if this were the case, there would still be a need to understand
the prestige of the myth and the origin of the fashion, and the opinion
of the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be
practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking, that it existed
as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a
philosophy . It has been long on the way, and its adherents have dis¬
covered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but
equally in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. A purely linguistic examina¬
tion of the texts in question would yield no proof; we find in texts
only what we put into them, and if ever any kind of history has sug¬
gested the interpretations which should be put on it, it is the history of
philosophy. We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity
and true meaning of phenomenology. It is less a question of counting
up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete form
this phenomenology for ourselves which has given a number of present-
day readers the impression, on reading Husserl or Heidegger, not so
much of encountering a new philosophy as of recognizing what they
had been waiting for. Phenomenology is accessible only through a
phenomenological method. Let us, therefore, try systematically to
bring together the celebrated phenomenological themes as they have
grown spontaneously together in life. Perhaps we shall then under¬
stand why phenomenology has for so long remained at an initial stage,
as a problem to be solved and a hope to be realized.

It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing.
Husserl’s first directive to phenomenology, in its early stages, to be a
‘descriptive psychology’, or to return to the ‘things themselves , is
from the start a rejection of science. I am not the outcome or the
meeting-point of numerous causal agencies which determine my
bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive myself as nothing
but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or
sociological investigation. I cannot shut myself up within the realm of
science. All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge,
is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some
experience of the world without which the symbols of science would
be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the
world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself
to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning
and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the
world of which science is the second-order expression. Science has
not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form
of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it
is a rationale or explanation of that world. I am, not a ‘living creature’
nor even a ‘man’, nor again even ‘a consciousness’ endowed with all

viii

PREFACE

the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psycho¬
logy recognize in these various products of the natural or historical
process — I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from
my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it
moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into ,
being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the
word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the
horizon whose distance from me would be abolished — since that
distance is not one of its properties — if I were not there to scan it with
my gaze. Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is
a moment of the world’s, are always both naive and at the same time
dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mention¬
ing it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through
which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to
exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world
which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks , and in
relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and
derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country¬
side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a
river is.

This move is absolutely distinct from the idealist return to con¬
sciousness, and the demand for a pure description excludes equally
the procedure of analytical reflection on the one hand, and that of
scientific explanation on the other. Descartes and particularly Kant
detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not
possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced
myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented con¬
sciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the
condition of there being anything at all ; and the act of relating as the
basis of rclatcdness. It is true that the act of relating is nothing if
divorced from the spectacle of the world in which relations are
found; the unity of consciousness in Kant is achieved simultaneously
with that of the world. And in Descartes methodical doubt does not
deprive us of anything, since the whole world, at least in so far as we
experience it, is reinstated in the Cogito , enjoying equal certainty, and
simply labelled ‘thought about . . But the relations between sub¬
ject and world are not strictly bilateral: if they were, the certainty of
the world would, in Descartes, be immediately given with that of the
Cogito , and Kant would not have talked about his ‘Coperaican
revolution’. Analytical reflection starts from our experience of the
world and goes back to the subject as to a condition of possibility
distinct from that experience, revealing the all-embracing synthesis as
that without which there would be no world. To this extent it ceases
to remain part of our experience and offers, in place of an account, a

PREFACE

reconstruction. It is understandable, in view of this, that Husserl,
having accused Kant of adopting a ‘faculty psychologism’,1 should
have urged, in place of a noetic analysis which bases the world on the
synthesizing activity of the subject, his own ‘ noematic reflection ’
which remains within the object and, instead of begetting it, brings
to light its fundamental unity.

The world is there before any possible analysis of mine, and it
would be artificial to make it the outcome of a series of syntheses
which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the object
corresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but
products of analysis, with no sort of prior reality. Analytical reflection
believes that it can trace back the course followed by a prior constitut¬
ing act and arrive, in the ‘inner man’ — to use Saint Augustine’s
expression — at a constituting power which has always been identical
with that inner self. Thus reflection itself is carried away and trans¬
planted in an impregnable subjectivity, as yet untouched by being
and time. But this is very ingenuous, or at least it is an incomplete
form of reflection which loses sight of its own beginning. When I
begin to reflect my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience ;
moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and
so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed
structure of consciouness, and yet it has to recognize, as having
priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the sub¬
ject, because the subject is given to himself. The real has to be de¬
scribed, not constructed or formed. Which means that I cannot put
perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by
judgements, acts or predications. My field of perception is constantly
filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which
I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world,
yet which I nevertheless immediately ‘place’ in the world, without
ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave
dreams round things. I imagine people and things whose presence is
not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in fact involved in
it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary. If the
reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence
of ‘representations’, it ought to be for ever hesitant and, being
wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be cease¬
lessly taking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality
stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place. But this does
not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our
judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or
before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deli-
1 Logische Untersuchungen , Prolegomena zur reinen Logik , p. 93.

PREFACE

berate taking up of a position ; it is the background from which all
acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an
object such that 1 have in my possession the law of its making; it is
the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my
explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man1,1
or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and
only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from
an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science,
I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to be in
the world.

All of which reveals the true meaning of the famous phenomeno¬
logical reduction. There is probably no question over which Husserl
lias spent more time — or to which he has more often returned, since
the ‘problematic of reduction* occupies an important place in his
unpublished work. For a long time, and even in recent texts, the re¬
duction is presented as the return to a transcendental consciousness
before which the world is spread out and completely transparent,
quickened through and through by a series of apperceptions which it
is the philosopher’s task to reconstitute on the basis of their outcome.
Thus my sensation of redness is perceived as the manifestation of a
certain redness experienced, this in turn as the manifestation of a red
surface, which is the manifestation of a piece of red cardboard, and
this finally is the manifestation or outline of a red tiling, namely this
book. We are to understand, then, that it is the apprehension of a
certain h yld, as indicating a phenomenon of a higher degree, the Simt-
gebung, or active meaning-giving operation which may be said to
define consciousness, so that the world is nothing but 'worid-as-
meaning’, and the phenomenological -reduction is idealistic, in the
sense that there is here a transcendental idealism which treats the
world as an indivisible unity of value shared by Peter and Paul, in
which their perspectives blend. ‘Peter’s consciousness’ and ‘Paul’s
consciousness’ are in communication, the perception of the world ’by
Peter’ is not Peter’s doing any more than its perception ’by Paul’ is
Paul’s doing; in each case it is the doing of pre-personal forms of
consciousness, whose communication raises no problem, since it is
demanded by the very definition of consciousness, meaning or truth.
In so far as I am a consciousness, that is, in so far as something has
meaning for me, I am neither here nor there, neither Peter nor Paul;

I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since
we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by
definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere. A
logically consistent transcendental idealism rids the world of its
1 In te redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas (Saint Augustine).

PREFACE

opacity and its transcendence. The world is precisely that thing of
which we form a representation, not as men or as empirical subjects,
but in so far as we are all one light and participate in the One without
destroying its unity. Analytical reflection knows nothing of the pro¬
blem of other minds, or of that of the world, because it insists that
with the first glimmer of consciousness there appears in me theoreti¬
cally the power of reaching some universal truth, and that the other
person, being equally without thisness, location or body, the Alter
and the Ego arc one and the same in the true world which is the
unifier of minds. There is no difficulty in understanding how / can
conceive the Other, because the I and consequently the Other are not
conceived as part of the woven stuff of phenomena; they have
validity rather than existence. There is nothing hidden behind these
faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a
little shadow which owes its very existence to the light. For Husserl,
on the contrary, it is well known that there is a problem of other
people, and the alter ego is a paradox. If the other is truly for himself
alone, beyond his being for me, and if we are for each other and not
both for God, we must necessarily have some appearance for each
other. He must and I must have an outer appearance, and there must
be, besides the perspective of the For Oneself— my view of myself and
the other’s of himself— a perspective of For Others— my view of
others and theirs of me. Of course, these two perspectives, in each
one of us, cannot be simply juxtaposed, for in that case it is not I
that the other would see , nor he that I should see . I must be the
exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the
other lumself. This paradox and the dialectic of the Ego and the
Alter are possible only provided that the Ego and the Alter Ego are
defined by their situation and are not freed from all inherence ; that is,
provided that philosophy does not culminate in a return to the self,
and that 1 discover by reflection not only my presence to myself, but
also the possibility of an "outside spectator’; that is, again, provided
that at the very moment when I experience my existence — at the ulti¬
mate extremity of reflection— I fall short of the ultimate density
which would place me outside time, and that I discover within myself
a kind of internal weakness standing in the way of my being totally
individualized : a weakness which exposes me to the gaze of others as
a man among men or at least as a consciousness among conscious¬
nesses. Hitherto the Cogito depreciated the perception of others,
teaching me as it did that the I is accessible only to itself, since it
defined me as the thought which I have of myself, and which clearly
I am alone in having, at least in this ultimate sense. For the "other’
to be more than an empty word, it is necessary that my existence
should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but that it

xii

PREFACE

should take in also the awareness that one may have of it, and thus
include my incarnation in some nature and the possibility, at least, of
a historical situation, The Cogito must reveal me in a situation, md\
it is on this condition alone that transcendental subjectivity can, as !
Husserl puts it,1 be an intersubjectivity. As a meditating Ego, I can
clearly distinguish from myself the world and tilings, since I cer¬
tainly do not exist in the way in which things exist. I must even set
aside from myself my body understood as a thing among things, as a
collection of physico-chemical processes. But even if the cogitatio,
which I thus discover, is without location in objective time and space,
it is not without place in the phenomenological world. The world,
which I distinguished from myself as the totality of things or of pro¬
cesses linked by causal relationships, I rediscover ‘in me' as the per¬
manent horizon of all my cogitationes and as a dimension in relation
to which I am constantly situating myself. The true Cogito does not
define the subject’s existence in terms of the thought he has of existing,
and furthermore does not convert the indubi lability of the world into
the mdubitabifity of thought about the world, nor finally does it re¬
place the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it
recognizes my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and does away
with any kind of idealism in revealing me as ‘being-in-the-worldV
It is because we are through and through compounded of relation¬
ships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the
fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity (to
look at it ohne mitzumachen, as Husserl often says), or yet again, to
put it ‘out of play*. Not because we reject the certainties of common
sense and a natural attitude to things — they are, on the contrary, the
constant theme of philosophy — but because, being the presupposed
basis of any thought, they are taken for gra ntcd, and go unnoticed, and
because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to
suspend for a moment our recognition of them. The best formulation
of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s
assistant, when he spoke of ‘wonder’ in the face of the world.2
Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of
consciousness as the world’s basis ; it steps back to watch the forms of
transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire ; it slackens the intentional
threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our
notice ; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that
world as strange and paradoxical. Husserl’s transcendental is not
Kant’s and Husserl accuses Kant’s philosophy of being ‘worldly’,

1 Die Krisls der europmschen Wissenschaften und die transzendeniak Phiino-
mettohgie, III (unpublished).

1 Die pMnomenobgisehe Philosophic Edmund Husserls in der gegenwdrtigen
Kritik i pp, 331 and m

xiii

PREFACE

because it makes use of our relation to the world, which is the motive
force of the transcendental deduction, and makes the world im¬
manent in the subject, instead of being filled with wonder at it and
conceiving the subject as a process oi transcendence towards the
world. All the misunderstandings with his interpreters, with the
existentialist ‘dissidents’ and finally with himself, have arisen from
the fact that in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we
must break with our familiar acceptance of it and, also, from the fact
that from this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated up¬
surge of the world. The most important lesson which the reduction
teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why
Husserl is constantly re-examining the possibility of the reduction. If
we were absolute mind, the reduction would present no problem.
But since, on the contrary, we are in the world, since indeed our
reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on to which we are
trying to seize (since they sich einstrSmen, as Husserl says), there is no
thought which embraces all our thought. The philosopher, as the
unpublished works declare, is a perpetual beginner, which means
that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise,
believe they know. It means also that philosophy itself must not take
itself for granted, in so far as it may have managed to say something
true; that it is an ever-renewed experiment in making its own begin¬
ning; that it consists wholly in the description of this beginning, and
finally, that radical reflection amounts to a consciousness of its own
dependence on an nnrcflective life which is its initial situation, un¬
changing, given once and for all. Far from being, as has been thought,
a procedure of idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction
belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s *being-in-the-world’
appears only against the background of the phenomenological
reduction.

A misunderstanding of a similar kind confuses the notion of the
‘essences in Husserl. Every reduction, says Husserl, as well as being
transcendental is necessarily eidetic. That means that we cannot sub¬
ject our perception of the world to philosophical scrutiny without
ceasing to be identified with that act of positing the world, with that
interest in it which delimits us, without drawing back from our com¬
mitment which is itself thus made to appear as a spectacle, without
passing from the fact of our existence to its nature, from the Dasein to
the Wesen. But it is dear that the essence is here not the end, but a
means, that our effective involvement in the world is precisely what
has to be understood and made amenable to conceptualization, for it
is what polarizes all our conceptual particularizations. The need to
proceed by way of essences does not mean that philosophy takes them

xiv

PREFACE

as its object, but, on the contrary, that our existence is too tightly
held in the world to be able to know itself as such at the moment of its
involvement, and that it requires the field of ideality in order to
become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity. The Vienna
Circle, as is well known, lays it down categorically that we can enter
into relations only with meanings. For example, ‘consciousness* is
not for the Vienna Circle identifiable with what we are. It is a complex
meaning which has developed late in time, which should be handled
with care, and only after the many meanings which have contributed,
throughout the word’s semantic development, to the formation of its
present one have been made explicit. Logical positivism of this kind
is the antithesis of Husserl’s thought. Whatever the subtle changes of
meaning which have ultimately brought us, as a linguistic acquisition,
the word and concept of consciousness, we enjoy direct access to what
it designates. For we have the experience of ourselves, of that con¬
sciousness which we are, and it is on the basis of this experience that
all linguistic connotations are assessed, and precisely through it that
language conies to have any meaning at all for us, it is that as yet
dumb experience . . . which we are concerned to lead to the pure
expression of its own meaning.*1 HusserPs essences arc destined to
bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s
net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and sea¬
weed. Jean Wahl is therefore wrong in saying that ‘Husserl separates
essences from existence’.2 The separated essences are those of lan¬
guage. It is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state
of separation which is in fact merely apparent, since through language
they still rest upon the a n te-pred icative life of consciousness. In the
silence of primary consciousness can be seen appearing not only
what words mean, but also what things mean: the core of primary
meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shapey

Seeking the essence of consciousness will therefore not consist in
developing the Wortbedeutung of consciousness and escaping from
existence into the universe of things said ; it will consist in rediscover- V
ing my actual presence to myself, the fact of my consciousness which J
is in the last resort what the word and the concept of consciousness j
mean. Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as /
an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking/
for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization. Sensationalism
‘reduces’ the world by noticing that after all we never experience any¬
thing but states of ourselves. Transcendental idealism too ‘reduces’
the world since, in so far as it guarantees the world, it does so by
regarding it as thought or consciousness of the world, and as the mere

1 Meditations caridsknnes, p. 33.

2 Rfalisme, dlatectiqm et mystere , TArbalete, Autumn, 1942, unpaginated.

PREFACE

correlative of our knowledge, with the result that it becomes imma¬
nent in consciousness and the aseity of things is thereby done away
with. The eidetic reduction is, on the other hand, the determination
to bring the world to light as it is before any falling back on ourselves
has occurred, it is the ambition to make reflection emulate the un«
reflective life of consciousness. I aim at and perceive a world. If I said,
as do the sensationalists, that we have here only ‘states of conscious¬
ness’, and if I tried to distinguish my perceptions from my dreams
with the aid of ‘criteria’, I should overlook the phenomenon of the
world. For if I am able to talk about ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’, to bother
my head about the distinction between imaginary and real, and cast
doubt upon the ‘real’, it is because this distinction is already made by
me before any analysis; it is because I have an experience of the real
as of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one not of asking
how critical thought can provide for itself secondary equivalents of
this distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge of
the ‘real’, of describing our perception of the world as that upon
which our idea of truth is for ever based. We must not, therefore,
wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say : the
world is what we perceive. In more general terms we must not
wonder whether our self-evident truths are real truths, or whether,
through some perversity inherent in our minds, that which is self-
evident for us might not be illusory in relation to some truth in itself.
For in so far as we talk about illusion, it is because we have identified
illusions, and done so solely in the light of some perception which at
the same time gave assurance of its own truth. It follows that doubt,
or the fear of being mistaken, testifies as soon as it arises to our
power of unmasking error, and that it could never finally tear us
away from truth. We are in the realm of truth and it is ‘the experience
of truth’ which is self-evident.1 2 To seek the essence of perception is to
declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to
truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to base
this de facto self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute
self-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughts
have for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied
forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through,
T should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world,
and should be looking for what makes that experience possible
instead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not
adequate thought or apodeictic self-evidence.® The world is not what

1 Das Erlebnis der Wahrheit ( Logische Untersuchungen, Prolegomena zur reineti
Logik ) p. 190.

2 There is no apodeictic self-evidence, the Formate und transzendentale Logik
(p. 142) says in effect.

xvi

PREFACE

I think, but what I live through, I am open to the worid, I have no
doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it;
it is inexhaustible. There is a world’, or rather: There is the world’;
I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion
in my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes the
Weltiichkeit der Welt, what causes the worid to be the world ; just as
the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather
what assures me of my existence. The eidetic method is the method
of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the
real.

We can now consider the notion of intentionality, too often cited
as the main discovery of phenomenology, whereas it is understand¬
able only through the reduction. "All consciousness is consciousness
of something’; there is nothing new in that. Kant showed, in the
Refutation of Idealism , that inner perception is impossible without
outer perception, that the worid, as a collection of connected
phenomena, is anticipated in the consciousness of my unity, and is
the means whereby I come into being as a consciousness. What
distinguishes intentionality from the Kantian relation to a possible
object is that the unity of the world, before being posited by know¬
ledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or
already there. Kant himself shows in the Critique of Judgement that
there exists a unity of the imagination and the understanding and a
unity of subjects before the object, and that, in experiencing the
beautiful, for example, I am aware of a harmony between sensation
and concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any
concept. Here the subject is no longer the universal thinker of a
system of objects rigorously interrelated, the positing power who sub¬
jects the manifold to the law of the understanding, tn so far as he is
to be able to put together a world— he discovers and enjoys his own
nature as spontaneously in harmony with the law of the understand¬
ing. But if the subject has a nature, then tile hidden art of the imagina¬
tion must condition the categorial activity. It is no longer merely the
aesthetic judgement, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an
art winch forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of con¬
sciousnesses.

Husserl takes up again the Critique of Judgement when he talks
about a teleology of consciousness. It is not a matter of duplicating
human consciousness with some absolute thought which, from out¬
side, is imagined as assigning to it its aims. It is a question of recogniz¬
ing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world
which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is per¬
petually directed — and the world as this pre-objective individual

xvii

PREFACE

whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal.
This is why Husserl distinguishes between intentionality of act, which
is that of our judgements and of those occasions when we voluntarily
take up a position— the only intentionality discussed in the Critique
of Pure Reason— and operative intentionality (fungierende Men -
tionalitdt )s or that which produces the natural and anteprcdicative
unity of the world and of our life, being apparent in our desires, our
evaluations and in the landscape wc sec, more clearly than in objec¬
tive knowledge, and furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to
translate into precise language. Our relationship to the world, as it is
untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any
further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more
before our eyes and present it for our ratification.

Through this broadened notion of intentionality, phenomeno¬
logical "comprehension* is distinguished from traditional "intellection',
which is confined to "true and immutable natures', and so pheno-
menology can become a phenomenology of origins. Whether we are
concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to
‘understand’ is to take in the total intention— not only what these
things are for representation (the ‘properties' of the thing perceived,
the mass of ‘historical facts’, the ‘ideas’ introduced by the doctrine) —
but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the
pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution,
in alt the thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each
civilization, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a
law of the physico-mathematical type, discoverable by objective
thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of
behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain
way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of
seizing upon and making his own. These are the dimensions of history.
In this context there is not a human word, not a gesture, even one
which is the outcome of habit or absent-mindedness, which has not
some meaning. For example, I may have been under the impression
that I lapsed into silence through weariness, or some minister may
have thought he had uttered merely an appropriate platitude, yet my
silence or his words immediately take on a significance, because my
fatigue or his falling back upon a ready-made formula are not acci¬
dental, for they express a certain lack of interest, and hence some
degree of adoption of a definite position in relation to the situation.

When an event is considered at close quarters, at the moment
when it is lived through, everything seems subject to chance: one
man’s ambition, some lucky encounter, some local circumstance or
other appears to have been decisive. But chance happenings offset
each other, and facts in their multiplicity coalesce and show up a

xviii

PREFACE

certain way of taking a stand in relation to the human situation,
reveal in fact an event which has its definite outline and about which
we can talk. Should the starting-point for the understanding of
history be ideology, or politics, or religion, or economics ? Should we
try to understand a doctrine from its overt content, or from the
psychological make-up and the biography of its author ? We must
seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously, every¬
thing has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being
underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that
they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into Iiistory and reach the
unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective.
It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its head, but it
is also true that it does not think with its feet. Or one should say
rather that it is neither its ‘head’ not its ‘feet’ that we have to worry
about, but its body. AH economic and psychological explanations of a
doctrine are true, since the thinker never thinks from any starting-
point but the one constituted by what he is. Reflection even on a
doctrine will be complete only if it succeeds in linking up with the
doctrine’s history and the extraneous explanations of it, and in putting
back the causes and meaning of the doctrine in an existential struc¬
ture. There is, as Husserl says, a ‘genesis of meaning’ (Sinngenesis),1
which alone, in the last resort, teaches us what the doctrine ‘means.’
Like understanding, criticism must be pursued at all levels, and
naturally, it will be insufficient, for the refutation of a doctrine, to
relate it to some accidental event in the author’s life; its significance
goes beyond, and there is no pure accident in existence or in co¬
existence, since both absorb random events and transmute them in¬
to the rational.

Finally, as it is indivisible in the present, history is equally so in its
sequences. Considered in the light of its fundamental dimensions, all
periods of History appear as manifestations of a single existence, or as
episodes in a single drama— without our knowing whether it has an
ending. Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning,
and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in
history.

Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united
extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the
world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the
experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality
is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a
meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed

1 Tire usual term in the unpublished writings. The idea is already to be found
in the Formate und transzendentale Logik, pp. 184 and IT.

xix

PREFACE

into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The pheno¬
menological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed
where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where
my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears.
It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which
find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of
the present, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the
philosopher’s thinking is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself
and endow its own results with reified form in the world. The
philosopher tries to conceive the world, others and himself and their
interrelations. But the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’
(urt inter essier ter Zuschauer)1 do not rediscover an already given
rationality, they ‘establish themselves’,8 and establish it, by an act of
initiative which has no guarantee in being, its justification resting
entirely on the effective power which it confers on us of taking our
own history upon ourselves.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit ex¬
pression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being.
Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art,
the act of bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this
creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing
Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world
itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence
does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of
which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is dearer than the
act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete
and conceive it. Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no
unknown quantity which has to be determined by deduction, or,
beginning with it, demonstrated inductively. We witness every minute
the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than
we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network
of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We
may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery de¬
fines them : there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution’,
it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in re¬
learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account
can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical
treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for
our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we
stake our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act which
is validated by being performed.

Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or

1 6th Meditation cartisienne (unpublished).

•Ibid.

PREFACE

rather provides its own foundation/1 AM knowledge is sustained by a
'ground* of postulates and finally by our communication with the
world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical
reflection, dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it
too is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. It
must therefore put to itself the question which it puts to all branches
of knowledge, and so duplicate itself infinitely, being, as Husserl says,
a dialogue or infinite meditation, and, in so far as it remains faithful
to its intention, never knowing where it is going. The unfinished
nature of phenomenology and the inchoative atmosphere which has
surrounded it are not to be taken as a sign of failure, they were
inevitable because phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of
the world and of reason.2 If phenomenology was a movement before
becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable
neither to accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the
works of Balzac, Proust, Valery or Cezanne— by reason of the same
kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness,
the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that
meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general
effort of modern thought*

1 ‘Rtickbeziehung der Phanomenologie auf sich selbst,’ say the unpublished
writings.

a We are indebted for this last expression to G. Gusdorf, who may well have
used it in another sense.

XXI

INTRODUCTION

Traditional Prejudices and the Return
to Phenomena

THE ‘SENSATION’ AS A UNIT
OF EXPERIENCE

AT the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the
notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a
sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however,
be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because
they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon
of perception.

I might in the first place understand by sensation the way in which

I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself. The greyness
which, when I close my eyes, surrounds me, leaving no distance
between me and it, the sounds that encroach on my drowsiness and
hum ‘in my head’ perhaps give some indication of what pure sensa¬
tion might be. I might be said to feel precisely to the extent that I
coincide with sensation, that it ceases to have any place in the
objective world, and that it signifies nothing for me. Tliis entails
recognizing that sensation should be sought on the hither side of any
qualified content, since red and blue, in order to be distinguishable
as two colours, must already form some picture before me, even
though no precise place be assigned to them, and thus cease to be
part of myself. Pure sensation will be the experience of an un¬
differentiated ‘impact’, instantaneous, an atom of feeling. It is
unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that tliis notion
corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudi¬
mentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures
such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not
on any absolute terms.* 1 But tliis does not dispose of the question as
to why we feel justified in theory in distinguishing within experience
a layer of ‘impressions’. Let us imagine a white patch on a homo¬
geneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain
1 See La Structure du Comportement, pp. 142 and ff.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

‘function’ in common, that of forming themselves into a ‘shape’.
The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more re-
sistent than that of the background; the edges of the white patch
‘belong’ to it, and are not part of the background although they
adjoin it: the patch appears to be placed on the background and does
not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it
contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged
with meaning. But if the shape and the background, as a whole, are
not sensible phenomena, they must be so, one may object, in each
of their points. To say this is to forget lliat each point in its turn can
be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory
informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-datum
available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of
factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring
in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the pheno¬
menon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be
said to be perception at all. The perceptual ‘something* is always in
the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A
really homogeneous area offering nothing to perception cannot be
given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can
teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not
only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as
an instant of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of
attending to the experience of perception, we overlook it in favour of
the object perceived. A visual field is not made up of limited views.
But an object seen is made up of bits of matter, and spatial points arc
external to each other. An isolated datum of perception is incon¬
ceivable, at least if we try to perceive it mentally. But in the world
there are either isolated objects or a physical void.

I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure
impression. To see is to have colours or lights before one, to hear is
to encounter sounds, to feel is to come up against qualities, and, in
order to know what sensation is, is it not enough to have seen the
colour red or to have heard the note A? Red or green are not sensa¬
tions, but sense-data, and quality is not an element of consciousness,
but a property of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of
delimiting sensations, if we consider it in the experience itself which
evinces it, it is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the
whole spectacle, perceived. This red patch which I see on the carpet
is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its quality is
apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an
element in a spatial configuration. Moreover the colour can be said
to be there only if it occupies an area of a certain size, too small an
area not being describable in these terms. Finally this red would

THE ‘SENSATION* AS A UNIT OF EXPERIENCE

literally not be the same if it were not the ‘woolly red’ of a carpet1
Analysis, then, discovers in each quality meanings which reside in it.
Jt may be objected that this is true only of the qualities which form
part of our actual experience, wliich are overlaid with a body of
knowledge, and that we are still justified in conceiving a ‘pure
quality’ which would set limits to a pure sensation. But as we have
just seen, this pure sensation would amount to no sensation, and
thus to not feeling at all. The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not
based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held pre¬
judice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ’hearing',
‘feeling’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects
which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it,
we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what
psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we
know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our
consciousness of them. We make perception out of things per¬
ceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously acces¬
sible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.
We are involved in the world and we do not succeed in extricating
ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world.
If we did we should see that the quality is never experienced im¬
mediately, and that all consciousness is consciousness of some¬
thing. Nor is this ‘something’ necessarily an identifiable object.
There arc two ways of being mistaken about quality: one is to make
it into an element of consciousness, when in fact it is an object for
consciousness, to treat it as an incommunicable impression, whereas
it always has a meaning; the other is to think that this meaning and
this object, at the level of quality, are fully developed and determin¬
ate. The second error, like the first, springs from our prejudice about
the world. Suppose we construct, by the use of optics and geometry,
that bit of the world which can at any moment throw its image on our
retina. Everything outside its perimeter, since it does not reflect upon
any sensitive area, no more affects our vision than does light falling
on our closed eyes. We ought, then, to perceive a segment of the
world precisely delimited, surrounded by a zone of blackness,
packed full of qualities with no interval between them, held together
by definite relationships of size similar to those lying on the retina.
The fact is that experience offers nothing like this, and we shall
never, using the world as our starting-point, understand what a
field of vision is. Even if it is possible to trace out a perimeter of
vision by gradually approaching the centre of the lateral stimuli,
the results of such measurement vary from one moment to another,
and one never manages to determine the instant when a stimulus
1 J. P. Sartre, V Imaginaire, p. 241 .

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

once seen is seen no longer. The region surrounding the visual field
is not easy to describe, but what is certain is that it is neither black
nor grey. There occurs here an indeterminate vision, a vision of some¬
thing or other, and, to take the extreme case, wliat is behind my back
is not without some element of visual presence. The two straight
lines in MOller-Lyer’s optical illusion (Fig. 1) are neither of equal
nor unequal length; it is only in the objective world that this question
arises.1 The visual field is that strange zone in which contradictory
notions jostle each other because the objects — the straight lines of
Miiller-Lyer — are not, in that field, in the realm of being, in which a
comparison would be possible, but each is taken in its private context

> - <

< - >

Fig. 1.

as if it did not belong to the same universe as the other. Psychologists
have for a long time taken great care to overlook these phenomena.
In the world taken in itself everything is determined. There are many
unclear sights, as for example a landscape on a misty day, but then
we always say that no real landscape is in itself unclear. Tt is so only
for us. The object, psychologists would assert, is never ambiguous,
but becomes so only through our inattention. The bounds of the
visual field arc not themselves variable, and there is a moment when
the approaching object begins absolutely to be seen, but we do not
‘notice’ it. But the notion of attention, as we shall show more fully, is
supported by no evidence provided by consciousness. It is no more
than an auxiliary hypothesis, evolved to save the prejudice in favour
of an objective world. We must recognize the indeterminate as a
positive phenomenon. It is in this atmosphere that quality arises. Its
meaning is an equivocal meaning; we are concerned with an ex¬
pressive value rather than with logical signification. The determinate
quality by which empiricism tried to define sensation is an object,
not an element, of consciousness, indeed it is the very lately de¬
veloped object of scientific consciousness. For these two reasons, it
conceals rather than reveals subjectivity.

The two definitions of sensation which we have just tried out were
only apparently direct. We have seen that they were based on the
object perceived. In this they were in agreement with common sense,
which also identifies the sensible by the objective conditions which
govern it. The visible is what is seized upon with the eyes, the sensible
1 Koffka, Psychologie, p. 530.

THE ‘SENSATION* AS A UNIT OF EXPERIENCE

is what is seized on by the senses. Let us follow up the idea of sensa¬
tion on tliis basis,1 and see what becomes of this ‘by* and this ‘with’,
and the notion of sense-organ, in the first-order thinking constituted
by science. Having shown that there is no experience of sensation,
do we at least find, in its causes and objective origins, any reasons for
retaining it as an explanatory concept? Physiology, to which, the
psychologist turns as to a higher court of appeal, is in the same
predicament as psychology. It too first situates its object in the world
and treats it as a bit of extension. Behaviour is thus hidden by the
reflex, the elaboration and patterning of stimuli, by a longitudinal
theory of nervous functioning, which establishes a theoretical corre¬
spondence between each element of the situation and an element of
the reaction.® As in the case of the reflex arc theory, physiology of
perception begins by recognizing an anatomical path leading from
a receiver through a definite transmitter to a recording station,3
equally specialized. The objective world being given, it is assumed
that it passes on to the sense-organs messages which must be regi¬
stered, then deciphered in such a way as to reproduce in us the
original text. Hence we have in principle a pomt-by-point corre¬
spondence and constant connection between the stimulus and the
elementary perception. But this ‘constancy hypothesis*4 conflicts
with the data of consciousness, and the very psychologists who accept
it recognize its purely theoretical character.* For example, the in¬
tensity of a sound under certain circumstances lowers its pitch; the

1 There is no justification for dodging the issue, as does Jaspers, for example
(Zwr Analyse der Trugwahrnehmungen) by selling up in opposition, on the one
hand a descriptive psychology which 'understands1 phenomena, and on the other
an explanatory psychology, which concerns itself with their origin. The psycho¬
logist always sees consciousness as placed in the body in the midst of the world,
and for him the scries stimulua-impression -percept ion is a sequence of events at
the end of which perception begins. Each consciousness is born in the world and
each perception is anew birth of consciousness. In this perspective the 'immediate1
data of perception can always be challenged as mere appearances and as complex
products of an origin. The descriptive method can acquire a genuine claim only
from the transcendental point of view. But, even from this point of view, the pro¬
blem remains as to how consciousness perceives itself or appears to itself as in¬
serted In a nature. For the philosopher, as for the psychologist, there is therefore
always a problem of origins, and the only method passible is to follow, in its
scientific development, the causal explanation in order Co make its meaning quite
dear, and assign to it its proper place in the body of truth. That is why there will
be found no refutation, but only an effort to understand the difficulties peculiar
to causal thinking.

8 See La Structure du Comportement , Chap. I.

8 We are translating roughly the series 1 E m pfa nger- Obcrm j t tler-Empfinder
spoken of by J. Stein, Vber die Ver&nderung der Sinnesletstungen und die Bnt -
stehung von Trugwahrnehmungen , p. 35 L

4 Koehler, Ober unbemerkte Empfindtmgm und Urteilstduschungen .

1 Stumpf does so explicitly. Cf. Koehler, ibid., p. 54.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

addition of auxiliary lines makes two figures unequal which are
objectively equal;1 a coloured area appears to be the same colour
over the whole of its surface, whereas the chromatic thresholds of
the different parts of the retina ought to make it red in one place,
orange somewhere else, and in certain cases colourless.2 Should
these cases in which the phenomenon does not correspond to the
stimulus be retained within the framework of the law of con¬
stancy, and explained by additional factors — attention and judge¬
ment— or must the law itself be jettisoned? When red and green,
presented together, give the result grey, it is conceded that the central
combination of stimuli can immediately give rise to a different
sensation from what the objective stimuli would lead us to expect.
When the apparent size of an object varies with its apparent distance,
or its apparent colour with our recollections of the object, it is
recognized that ‘the sensory processes are not immune to central
influences’.3 In this case, therefore, the ‘sensible’ cannot be defined
as the immediate effect of an external stimulus. Cannot the same
conclusion be drawn from the first three examples we have men¬
tioned? If attention, more precise instructions, rest or prolonged
practice finally bring perception into line with the law of constancy,
this does not prove the law’s universal validity, for, in the examples
quoted, the first appearance possessed a sensory character just as in-
contestable as the filial results obtained. So the Question is whether

attentive perception, the subject’s concentration on one point of the
visual field — for example, the ‘analytic perception’ of the two main
lines in Muller-Lyer’s optical illusion — do not, instead of revealing
‘normal sensation’, substitute an artificial set-up for the original
phenomenon.4 The law of constancy cannot avail itself, against the
testimony of consciousness, of any crucial experience in which it is
not already implied, and wherever we believe that we are establish¬
ing it, it is already presupposed/' If wc turn back to the phenomena,
they show us that the apprehension of a quality, just as that of size,
is bound up with a whole perceptual context, and that the stimuli
no longer furnish us with the indirect means we were seeking of
isolating a layer of immediate impressions. But when we look for an
‘objective’ definition of sensation, it is not only the physical stimulus

1 Koehler, ibid., pp. 57-8, cf. pp. 58-66.

2 R. Dejean, Les Conditions objectives de la Perception visuelle , pp. 60 and 83.

3 Stumpf, quoted by Koehler, ibid., p. 58.

4 Koehler, ibid., pp. 58-63.

* It is only fair to add that this is true of all theories, and that nowhere is there
a crucial experience. For the same reason the constancy hypothesis cannot be
completely refuted on the basis of induction. II is discredited because it overlooks
and does not permit of any understanding of phenomena. It is still necessary, in
order to perceive and judge it, that we should have ‘put it in abeyance*.

THE ‘SENSATION’ AS A UNIT OF EXPERIENCE

which slips through our fingers. The sensory apparatus, as conceived
by modem physiology, is no longer fitted for the rdle of 'transmitter’
cast for it by traditional science. Non-cortical lesions of the apparatus
of touch no doubt lessen the concentration of points sensitive to heat
and cold, or pressure, and diminish the sensitivity of those that remain-
But if, to the injured system, a sufficiently extensive stimulus be
applied, the specific sensations reappear. The raising of the thresholds
is compensated by a more vigorous movement of the hand.1

One can discern, at the rudimentary stage of sensibility, a working
together on the part of partial stimuli and a collaboration of the
sensory with the motor system which, in a variable physiological
constellation, keeps sensation constant, and rules out any definition
of the nervous process as the simple transmission of a given message.
The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows
the same law; all colours are affected in the first place,9 and lose
their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to
four and soon to two colours; finally a grey monochrome stage is
reached, although the pathological colour is never identifiable with
any normal one. Thus in central as in peripheral lesions The loss of
nervous substance results not only in a deficiency of certain qualities,
but in the change to a less differentiated and more primitive struc¬
ture’.3 Conversely, normal functioning must be understood as a
^process of integration in which the text of the external world is not
so much copied, as composed. And if we try to seize "sensation*
within the perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way
to it, we find not a psychic individual, a function of certain known
variables, but a formation already bound up with a larger whole,
already endowed with a meaning, distinguishable only in degree
from the more complex perceptions, and which therefore gets us no
further in our attempt to delimit pure sensation. There is no physio¬
logical definition of sensation, and more generally there is no physio¬
logical psychology which is autonomous, because the physiological
event itself obeys biological and psychological laws. For a long time
it was thought that peripheral conditioning was the surest method of
identifying "elementary’ psychic functions, and of distinguishing
them from ‘superior’ functions less strictly bound up with the bodily
substructure. A closer analysis, however, reveals that the two kinds
of function overlap. The elementary is no longer that which by
addition will cumulatively constitute the whole, nor is it a mere
1 Stein, op. cit., pp. 357-9.

* Fven daltonism does not prove that certain systems are, and are alone in
being, entrusted with 'seeing* red and green, since a colour-blind person manages
to distinguish red if a large area in that colour is put before him, or if the presenta¬
tion of the colour is made to last a long time. Id. ibid., p. 365.

% Weizsackcr, quoted by Stein, ibid., p. 364,

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

occasion for the whole to constitute itself. The elementary event is
already invested with meaning, and the higher function wilt bring
into being only a more integrated mode of existence or a more valid
adaptation, by using and sublimating the subordinate operations.
Conversely, ‘the experience of feeling is a vital process, no less than
procreation, breathing or growth5.1 2 Psychology and physiology are
no longer, then, two parallel sciences, but two accounts of behaviour,
the first concrete, the second abstract.3 We said that when the
psychologist asks the physiologist for a definition of sensation ‘in
causal terms’, he encounters once more on this new ground his
familiar difficulties, and now we can see why. The physiologist for
his part has to rid himself of the realistic prejudice which all the
sciences borrow from common sense, and which hampers them in
their development. The changed meaning of the terms ‘elementary’
and ‘more advanced’ in modern physiology proclaims a changed
philosophy.3 The scientist too must learn to criticize the idea of an
external world in itself, since the facts themselves prompt him to
abandon that of the body as a transmitter of messages. The sensible
is what is apprehended with the senses, but now we know that this
‘with’ is not merely instrumental, that the sensory apparatus is not a
conductor, that even on the periphery the physiological impression
is involved in relations formerly considered central.

Once more, reflection — even the second-order reflection of science —
obscures what we thought was clear. We believed we knew what
feeling, seeing and hearing were, and now these words raise problems.
We are invited to go back to the experiences to which they refer in
order to redefine them. The traditional notion of sensation was not a
concept bom of reflection, but a late product of thought directed
towards objects, the last element in the representation of the world,
the furthest removed from its original source, and therefore the most
unclear. Inevitably science, in its general effort towards objectifica¬
tion, evolved a picture of the human organism as a physical system
undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their
physico-chemical properties, and tried to reconstitute actual per¬
ception4 * * * * * 10 on this basis, and to close the circle of scientific knowledge

1 Weizsacker, quoted by Stein, ibid., p. 354.

2 On all these points see La Structure du Comportement , in particular pp. 52
and ff., 65 and ff.

3 Gelb, Die Farbenkonstcmz der Sehdinge, p. 595.

4 ‘The sensations are certainly artificial products, but not arbitrary ones, they

are the last component wholes into which the natural structures can be decom¬

posed by the ‘‘analytical attitude'1. Seen from this point of view, they contribute

to the knowledge of structures, and consequently the results of the study of sensa¬

tions, correctly interpreted, are an important element in the psychology of per¬

ception.’ Koffka, Psychologies p. 548.

THE ‘SENSATION’ AS A UNIT OF EXPERIENCE

by discovering the laws governing the production of knowledge
itself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity.1 But it is
also inevitable that this attempt should fail* If we return to the
objective investigations themselves, we first of all discover that the
conditions external to the sensory field do not govern it part for
part, and that they exert an effect only to the extent of making
possible a basic pattern — which is what Gestalt theory makes clear.
Then we see that within the organism the structure depends on
variables such as the biological meaning of the situation, which are
no longer physical variables, with the result that the whole eludes
the well-known instruments of physico-mathematical analysis, and
opens the way to another type of intelligibility.2 If we now turn back,
as is done here, towards perceptual experience, we notice that
science succeeds in constructing only a semblance of subjectivity: it
introduces sensations which are things, just where experience shows
that there are meaningful patterns; it forces the phenomenal universe
into categories which make sense only in the universe of science. It
requires that two perceived lines, like two real lines, should be
equal or unequal, that a perceived crystal should have a definite
number of sides,3 without realizing that the perceived, by its nature,
admits of the ambiguous, the shifting, and is shaped by its context.
In Muller-Lyer’s illusion, one of the lines ceases to be equal to the
other without becoming ‘unequal’: it becomes ‘different’. That is to
say, an isolated, objective line, and the same line taken" in a figure,
cease to be, for perception, ‘the same’. It is identifiable in these two
functions only by analytic perception, which is not natural. In the
same way the perceived contains gaps which are not mere ‘failures to
perceive’, I may, through sight or touch, recognize a crystal as
having a ‘regular* shape without having, even tacitly, counted its
sides. I may be familiar with a face without ever having perceived the
colour of the eyes in themselves. The theory of sensation, which
builds up all knowledge out of determinate qualities, offers us
objects purged of all ambiguity, pure and absolute, the ideal rather
than the real themes of knowledge: in short, it is compatible only
with the lately developed superstructure of consciousness. That is
where ‘the idea of sensation is approximately realized’.4

The images which instinct projects before it, those which tradition
recreates in each generation, or simply dreams, are in the first place
presented on an equal footing with genuine perceptions, and gradu¬
ally, by critical labour, the true, present and explicit perception is

1 Cf. Guillaume, V Object ivit 6 en Psychologic .

2 Cf. La Structure du Comportement , Chap. III.

3 Koffka, Psychologic , pp. 530 and 549.

4 M. Scheler, Die Wissenformen und die Gesellschaft , p. 412.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

distinguished from phantasms. The word perception indicates a
direction rather than a primitive function,1 it is known that the
uniformity of apparent size of objects at different distances, or of
their colour in different lights, is more perfect in children than in
adults.2 It follows that perception is more strictly bound up with the
local stimulus in its developed than in its undeveloped state, and more
in conformity with the theory of sensation in the adult than in the
child. It is like a net with its knots showing up more and more
clearly.3 ‘Primitive thought’ has been pictured in a way which can be
understood only if the responses of primitive people, their pro¬
nouncements and the sociologists’ interpretations are related to the
fund of perceptual experience which they are all trying to translate.4
It is sometimes the adherence of the perceived object to its context,
and, as it were, its viscosity, sometimes the presence in it of a
positive indeterminate which prevents the spatial, temporal and
numerical wholes from becoming articulated into manageable, dis¬
tinct and identifiable terms. And it is this pre-objective realm that
we have to explore in ourselves if we wish to understand sense
experience.

> M. Sehelcr, Die Wissenformen mid die Gese Use haft, p. 397. ‘Man approaches
ideal and exact images better than the animal, the adult better than the child,
men better than women, the individual better that) the member of a group, the
man who thinks historically and systematically better than the man impelled by
tradition, “imprisoned" in it and incapable of object ivizing, by building up re¬
collection, the environment in which he is involved, of localizing it in time and
possessing it by setting iL away from himself in a past context,’

3 Hering, Jacnsch,

3 Schsler, Die Wissenformen and die Geseilschaft, p. 412.

4 Cf. Wertheimer, Vber das Denken der Nalurvolker, in Drei Ahhandhmgen zur
Gestalt theorie.

‘ASSOCIATION’ AND THE
‘PROJECTION OF MEMORIES’

ONCE introduced, the notion of sensation distorts any analysis of
perception. Already a ‘figure’ on a ‘background’ contains, as we
have seen, much more than the qualities presented at a given time.
It has an ‘outline’, which does not ‘belong’ to the background and
which ‘stands out’ from it; it is ‘stable’ and offers a ‘compact’ area
of colour, the background on the other hand having no bounds,
being of indefinite colouring and ‘running on’ under the figure. The
different parts of the whole — ’for example, the portions of the figure
nearest to the background— possess, then, besides a colour and
qualities, a particular significance. The question is, what makes up
this significance, what do the words ‘edge’ and ‘outline’ mean, what
happens when a collection of qualities is apprehended as a figure on a
background? But once sensation is introduced as an element of
knowledge, we are left no choice of reply. A being capable of feeling
—in the sense of coinciding absolutely with an impression or a
quality — could have no other mode of knowing. That a quality, an
area of red should signify something, that it should be, for example,
seen as a patch on a background, means that the red is not this
warm colour which I feel and live in and lose myself in, but that it
announces something else which it does not include, that it exercises
a cognitive function, and that its parts together make up a whole to
which each is related without leaving its place. Henceforth the red is
no longer merely there, it represents something for me, and what it
represents is not possessed as a Teat part’ of my perception, but only
aimed at as an ‘intentional part’.1 My gaze does not merge with the
outline or the patch as it does with the redness considered con¬
cretely: it ranges over and dominates them. In order to receive in

1 The expression is Husserl’s. The idea is taken up with insight by M. Pradines,
Philosophie de la Sensation, I, particularly on pp. 152 and ff.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

itself a meaning which really transfuses it, in order to become
integrated into an ‘outline’ which is bound up with the ‘figure’ and
independent of ‘background’, the atomic sensation ought to cease to
be an absolute coincidence, which means ceasing to exist as a sensa¬
tion. If we admit ‘sensation’ in the classical sense, the meaning of the
sense-datum can be found only in further sensations, actual or
possible. Seeing a figure can be only simultaneously experiencing all
the atomic sensations which go to form it. Each one remains for
ever what it is, a blind contact, an impression, while the whole
collection of these becomes ‘vision’, and forms a picture before us
because we learn to pass quickly from one im¬
pression to another. A shape is nothing but a
sum of limited views, and the consciousness of a
shape is a collective entity. The sensible elements
of which it is made up cannot lose the opacity
which defines them as sense-data, and open
themselves to some intrinsic connection, to some
law of conformation governing them all.

Let three points A, B and C be taken on the
outline of a figure: their spatial order is both their way of co¬
existing before our eyes, and that co-existence itself, however near
together be the points chosen, the sum of their separate exist¬
ences, the position of A, plus the position of B , plus the position
of C . It may well happen that empiricism abandons this atom¬
istic manner of expression, and begins to talk about pieces of
space or pieces of duration, thus adding an experience of
relationships to that of qualities. But that does not affect the
empiricist position in the slightest degree. Either the piece of
space is traversed and inspected by a mind, in which case empiri¬
cism is abandoned, since consciousness is no longer defined in
terms of the impression; or else it is itself given in the manner of
an impression, when it becomes just as exclusive of any more
extensive co-ordination as the atomic impression first discussed.

The fact is that a shape is not only the sum of present data, for
these latter call up other complementary ones. When I say that I
have before me a red patch, the meaning of the word patch is pro¬
vided by previous experiences which have taught me the use of the
word. The distribution in space of the three points A, B and C recalls
other comparable distributions, and I say that I see a circle. Nor does
the appeal to experience gained affect the empiricist thesis. The
‘association of ideas’ which brings past experience into play can
restore only extrinsic connections, and can be no more than one
itself, because the original experience involved no others. Once con¬
sciousness has been defined as sensation, every mode of conscious-

‘association’ and the ‘projection of memories’

ness will have to derive its clarity from sensation. The word circle , or
the word order , have been able to signify no more, in the earlier
experiences to which I refer, than the concrete manner in which our
sensations distributed themselves before us, a certain de facto
arrangement, a way of feeling. If the three points A, B and C are on
a circle, the path AB ‘resembles’ the path BC, but this resemblance
means no more than that one path makes one think of the other.
The path ABC resembles other circular paths over which my eye has
travelled, but that merely means that it recalls them and brings the
image of them to mind. It is never possible for two terms to be
identified , perceived or understood as the same , for that would pre¬
suppose that their this-ness is overcome. They can only be indis¬
solubly associated and everywhere substituted for each other.
Knowledge thus appears as a system of substitutions in which one
impression announces others without ever justifying the announce¬
ment, in which words lead one to expect sensations as evening leads
one to expect night. The significance of the percept is nothing but a
cluster of images which begin to reappear without reason. The
simplest images or sensations are, in the last analysis, all that there
is to understand in words, concepts being a complicated way of
designating them, and as they are themselves inexpressible im¬
pressions, understanding is a fraud or an illusion. Knowledge never
has any hold on objects, which bring each other about, while the
mind acts as a calculating machine,1 which has no idea why its
results are true. Sensation admits of no philosophy other than that of
nominalism, that is, the reduction of meaning to the misinterpreta¬
tion of vague resemblance or to the meaninglessness of association by
contiguity.

Now the sensations and images which should be the beginning and
end of all knowledge never make their appearance anywhere other
than within a horizon of meaning, and the significance of the per¬
cept, far from resulting from an association, is in fact presupposed in
all association, whether it concerns the conspectus of a figure before
one, or the recollection of former experiences. Our perceptual field
is made up of ‘things’ and ‘spaces between things’.2 The parts of a
thing are not bound together by a merely external association arising
from their interrelatedness observed while the object is in movement.
For in the first place I see, as things, groupings which I have never
seen in movement: houses, the sun, mountains, for example. Whether
or not it is insisted that I extend to static objects a notion acquired
through the experience of objects in motion, the fact remains that

1 Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen , Chap. I, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik ,

p. 68.

2 See, for example, Koehler, Gestalt Psychology , pp. 164-5.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

the mountain must present in its actual appearance some character¬
istic which gives ground for recognizing it as a thing, and justifies
this transference of notion. In which case the characteristic is
sufficient, without any such transference, to explain the segregation
of the perceptual field. Even the unity of ordinary things, which a
child may handle and move about, does not amount to establishing
their substantiality. If we set ourselves to see as things the intervals
between them, the appearance of the world would be just as strikingly
altered as is that of the puzzle at the moment when I pick out ‘the
rabbit’ or ‘the hunter’. There would not be simply the same elements
differently related, the same sensations differently associated, the
same text cltargcd with a different sense, the same matter in another
form, but in truth another world.

There are not arbitrary data which set about combining into a
thing because de facto proximities or likenesses cause them to
associate; it is, on the contrary, because we perceive a grouping as a
thing that the analytical attitude can then discern likenesses or
proximities. This does not mean simply that without any perception
of the whole we would not think of noticing the resemblance or the
contiguity of its elements, but literally that they would not be part
of the same world and would not exist at all. The psychologist, who
always conceives consciousness as in the world, includes resemblance
and contiguity of stimuli among the objective conditions which
bring about the grouping together of a whole. The stimuli nearest to
each other or most similar, he says,1 or those which together endow
the spectacle with the best balance, tend, for perception, to unite
into the same configuration. But this way of talking is misleading,
because it separates objective stimuli which belong to the world as
perceived — and even to the second-order world elaborated by the
scientific consciousness — and perceptual consciousness, which it is
the duty of psychology to describe according to direct experience.
The psychologist’s hybrid thinking always runs the risk of reintro¬
ducing into the description relationships belonging to the objective
world. Thus it was possible to think of Wertheimer's law of con¬
tiguity and law of resemblance as bringing back the associationist’s
objective contiguity and resemblance in the r&le of constitutive
principles of perception. In reality, for pure description — and
formalism claims to be a description — the contiguity and resemblance
of stimuli do not precede the constitution of the whole. ‘Good form’
is not brought about because it would be good in itself in some meta¬
physical heaven; it is good form because it comes into being in our
experience. The alleged conditions of perception precede perception

1 Wertheimer, for example (the laws of proximity, of resemblance and the law
of ‘good form’).

‘association’ and the ‘projection of memories’

itself only when, instead of describing the perceptual phenomenon as
the first way of access to the object, we suppose round about it a
setting in which all disclosure of the implicit and all cross-checking
performed by analytic perception are included, and all the norms of
actual perception vindicated — in short, a realm of truth, a world. In
doing so we relieve perception of its essential function, which is to
lay the foundations of, or inaugurate, knowledge, and we see it
through its results. If we confine ourselves to phenomena, the unity
of the thing in perception is not arrived at by association, but is a
condition of association, and as such precedes the verifications which
establish and delimit it, and indeed precedes itself.

If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and
the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune,
there will be a moment when these details suddenly become part of
the ship, and indissolubly fused with it. As I approached, I did not
perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to
form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship. I merely
felt that the look of the object was on the point of altering, that some¬
thing was imminent in this tension, as a storm is imminent in storm
clouds. Suddenly the sight before me was recast in a manner satis¬
fying to my vague expectation. Only afterwards did I recognize, as
justifications for the change, the resemblance and contiguity of what
I call ‘stimuli’ — namely the most determinate phenomena, seen at
close quarters and with which I compose the ‘true’ world. ‘How could
I have failed to see that these pieces of wood were an integral part
of the ship? For they were of the same colour as the ship, and fitted
well enough into its superstructure.’ But these reasons for correct
perception were not given as reasons beforehand. The unity of the
object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent order which is
about to spring upon us a reply to questions merely latent in the
landscape. It solves a problem set only in the form of a vague feeling
of uneasiness, it organizes elements which up to that moment did
not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, as Kant
said with profound insight, could not be associated. By placing them
on the same footing, that of the unique object, synopsis makes con¬
tinuity and resemblance between them possible. An impression can
never by itself be associated with another impression.

Nor has it the power to arouse others. It does so only provided that
it is already understood in the light of the past experience in which it
co-existed with those which we are concerned to arouse. Imagine a
set of double syllables1 in which the second is a ‘softened’ rhyme of
the first ( tak-dak), and another set in which the second syllable has

1 K. Lewin, Vorbemerkungert Uber die psychischen Krafte undEnergien unduber
die Struktur der Seeie.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

the letters of the first in reverse order ( ged-deg ); if the two sets have
been learnt by heart and if, in a critical experiment* the subject is
given the uniform task of ‘finding a softened rhyme*, it is noticeable
that he has more difficulty in finding such a rhyme for ged than for a
neutral syllable* But if the task is to change the vowel in the syllables
given, no delay occurs. It could not, then, be powers of association
which operated in the first experiment, for if they existed they ought
to operate equally in the second* The truth is that, faced with
syllables often associated with softened rhymes, the subject, instead
of rhyming in reality, takes advantage of what he knows, and sets in
motion a ‘reproduction intention*,1 so that when he arrives at the
second set of syllables, in which the task is no longer related to the
patterns with which he has been trained to deal, the reproduction
intention can lead only to mistakes* When, in the second critical
experiment, the subject is told to change the vowel in the prompting
syllable, as the task lias never figured in the preparatory drill, he
cannot use the by-pass of reproduction, and under these circum¬
stances the preparatory drill has no effect* Association therefore
never comes into play as an autonomous force; it is never the word
suggested which ‘induces* the reply in the manner of an efficient
cause; it acts only by making probable or attractive a reproduction
intention; it operates only in virtue of the meaning it has acquired
in the context of the former experience and in suggesting recourse to
that experience; it is efficacious to the extent to which the subject
recoguizes if, and grasps it in the light or appearance of the past If
finally it were desired to bring into operation, instead of simple
continuity, association by resemblance, it would still be seen that in
order to recall a former image which present perception resembles,
the latter must be patterned in such a way that it can sustain this re¬
semblance. Whether a subject0 has seen Figure 1 five or five hundred
times he will recognize it almost equally easily in Figure 2 where it
appears "camouflaged1; moreover he will never see it there con¬
stantly. On the other hand a subject who is looking, in Figure 2,
for another disguised figure (without knowing which one), redis¬
covers it there more quickly and more frequently than a passive
subject who is equally familiar with the figures. Resemblance is,
therefore, like co-existence in not being a force so to speak in the
third person, which directs a traffic of images or ‘states of conscious¬
ness1* Figure 1 is not recalled by Figure 2, or rather it is so recalled
only if one has first seen in Figure 2 ‘a possible Figure l\ which
amounts to saying that the actual resemblance does not relieve us of

1 ‘Set to reproduce’, KofTka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, p* 581.

a Gottschaldt, Ober den Eitifluss der Erfaknmg auf die Wahrnehnmngen von
Figuren .

‘association’ and the ‘projection of memories’

the necessity of asking how it is first made possible by the present
organization of Figure 2. The ‘prompting’ figure must take on the
same meaning as the induced figure before it can recall it, and finally
the de facto past is not imported into present perception by a mechan¬
ism of association, but arrayed in present consciousness itself.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

From this can be judged the worth of accepted formulas about
‘the r61e of memories in perception'. Even outside empiricism tiierc is
talk of ‘the contributions of memory'.1 People go on saying that *lo
perceive is to remember’. It is shown that in the reading of a book the
speed of the eye leaves gaps in the retinal impressions, therefore the
sense-data must be filled out by a projection of memories,2 A land¬
scape or newspaper seen upside down are said to represent our
original view of them, our normal view of them being now natural
by reason of what is added to it by memory. ‘Because of the un¬
accustomed arrangement of impressions the influence of psychic
causes can no longer be felt.3 It is not asked why differently arranged
impressions make the newspaper unreadable or the landscape un¬
recognizable. The answer is: because in order to fill out perception,
memories need to have been made possible by the physiognomic
character of the data. Before any contribution by memory, what is
seen must at the present moment so organize itself as to present a
picture to me in which I can recognize my former experiences. Thus
the appeal to memory presupposes what it is supposed to explain: the
patterning of data, the imposition of meaning on a chaos of sense-
data. No sooner is the recollection of memories made possible than
it becomes superfluous, since the work it is being asked to do is
already done. The same may be said of this ‘colouring of memory’
(Geddchmisfarbe) which, in the opinion of other psychologists,
eventually takes the place of the present colour of objects, so that we

1 Brunsehvicg, U Experience humaine et la Catisalite physique, p. 466.

•Bergson, L'Energie spirilnette, ‘L'elTorl iniellcctuel’, e.g., p. 184.

3 Cf. for example Ebbinghaus, Abriss der Psychologic, pp. 104-5.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

see them ‘through the spectacles’ of memory.1 The question is, what
at this moment awakens the ‘colouring of memory’. It is recalled,
says Hering, every time we see an object we already know, ‘ or believe
we see it\ But on what basis have we this belief? What is it, in present
perception, which teaches us that we are dealing with an already
familiar object, since ex hypothesi its properties are altered? If it is
argued that recognition of shape or size is bound up with that of
colour, the argument is circular, since apparent size and shape are
also altered, and since recognition here too cannot result from the
recollection of memories, but must precede it. Nowhere then does it
work from past to present, and the ‘projection of memories’ is
nothing but a bad metaphor hiding a deeper, ready-made recognition.

In the same way, the illusion of correction cannot be understood
as the fusion of a few elements truthfully read off with memories
merging indistinguishably with them. How could the evocation of
memories come about unless guided by the look of the strictly visible
data, and if it is thus guided, what use is it then, since the word
already has its structure or its features before taking anything from
the storehouse of memory? Obviously it is the analysis of illusions
which has lent credence to the ‘projection of memories’, and which
follows roughly this sketchy reasoning: illusory perception cannot
rest upon ‘present data’, since I read ‘deduction’ when the word
printed is ‘destruction*. The letter d, which has taken the place of the
group str , not being presented to the eye, must come from somewhere
else. It is then said to come from memory. In the same way in a flat
picture a few patches of light and shade are enough to provide relief,
a few branches of a tree in a puzzle suggest a cat, several blurred lines
in the clouds a horse. But past experience can appear only after¬
wards as the cause of the illusion, and the present experience has, in
the first place, to assume form and meaning in order to recall pre¬
cisely this memory and not others. It is, then, before my eyes and
at this moment that the horse, the cat, the wrong word and the relief
come into being. The light and shade of the picture convey relief by
imitating ‘the original phenomenon of relief’,2 where they were in¬
vested with a basic spatial meaning. To enable me to find a cat in
the puzzle, it is necessary that ‘the meaning-unit “cat” should in
some way prescribe those elements of the picture which the co¬
ordinating activity is to retain and those which it is to overlook’.3
Illusion deceives us, and passes itself off as genuine perception pre-

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VlUVlj 1U U4V/UW VUJVi J ?1 lWl V illV ViifclilUlVJ ill WliV UK/LiLVW Vi

sensation and nowhere else. It imitates that privileged experience in

1 Hering, Grundzuge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn, p. 8.

2 Scheler, Idole der Selbsterkenntnis , p. 72.

3 Id. ibid.

‘association’ and the ‘projection of memories’

which the meaning exactly fits the sensation, clearly cohering, or
being evinced, in it. It implies this norm of perception, and therefore
cannot spring from any contact between sensation and memory, and
this is even more true of perception. The ‘projection of memories’
makes nonsense of both. For if a thing perceived were made up of
sensations and memories, it would depend for its precise identifica¬
tion on the contribution of memories, and would have in itself
nothing capable of stemming the flood of the latter, with the result
that, being deprived even of that outer fringe of vagueness which it
always in fact has, it would be, as we have said, intangible, elusive,
and always bordering on illusion. Illusion would, a fortiori , never
present the firm and well-defined appearance which a thing eventu¬
ally assumes, since perception itself would not have it, and so illusion
would not mislead us. If finally it is conceded that memories do not
by themselves project themselves upon sensations, but that con¬
sciousness compares them with the present data, retaining only those
which accord with them, then one is admitting an original text which
carries its meaning within itself, and setting it over against that of
memories: this original text is perception itself. In short, it is a mis¬
take to think that with the ‘projection of memories’ we are bringing
into perception some mental activity, and that we have taken up a
position opposed to that of empiricism. The theory is no more than
a consequence, a tardy and ineffective correction of empiricism,
accepting its postulates, sharing the same difficulties and, like
empiricism, concealing phenomena instead of elucidating them.

The postulate, as always, consists in deducing the datum from what
happens to be furnished by the sense organs. For example, in the
illusion of correction, the elements actually seen are reconstituted
according to the eye movements, the speed of reading and the time
needed for the retinal impression. Then, by subtracting these
theoretical data from total perception, the ‘recollected elements’ are
obtained which, in turn, are treated as mental entities. Perception is
built up with states of consciousness as a house is built with bricks,
and a mental chemistry is invoked which fuses these materials into a
compact whole. Like all empiricist theories, this one describes only
blind processes which could never be the equivalent of knowledge,
because there is, in this mass of sensations and memories, nobody who
sees , nobody who can appreciate the falling into line of datum and
recollection, and, on the other hand, no solid object protected by a
meaning against the teeming horde of memories. We must then dis¬
card this postulate which obscures the whole question. The cleavage
between given and remembered, arrived at by way of objective causes,
is arbitrary. When we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic
layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

meaning: not sensations with gaps between them, into which
memories may be supposed to slip, but the features, the layout of a
landscape or a word, in spontaneous accord with the intentions of the
moment, as with earlier experience.

It is at this stage that the real problem of memory in perception
arises, in association with the general problem of perceptual con¬
sciousness. We want to know how, by its own vitality, and without
carrying complementary material into a mythical unconscious, con¬
sciousness can, in course of time, modify the structure of its sur¬
roundings; how, at every moment, its former experience is present to
it in the form of a horizon which it can reopen — ‘if it chooses to
take that horizon as a theme of knowledge’ — in an act of recollec¬
tion, but which it can equally leave on the fringe of experience, and
which then immediately provides the perceived with a present atmo¬
sphere and significance. A field which is always at the disposal of
consciousness and one which, for that very reason, surrounds and
envelops its perceptions, an atmosphere, a horizon or, if you will,
given ‘sets’ which provide it with a temporal situation, such is the
way in which the past is present, making distinct acts of perception
and recollection possible. To perceive is not to experience a host of
impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them; it
is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent signifi¬
cance without which no appeal to memory is possible. To remember
is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture
of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take
apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences
which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. To per¬
ceive is not to remember.

The relationships ‘figure’ and ‘background’, ‘thing’ and ‘not-
thing’, and the horizon of the past appear, then, to be structures of
consciousness irreducible to the qualities which appear in them.
Empiricism will always retain the expedient of treating this a priori
as if it were the product of some mental chemistry. The empiricist
will concede that every object is presented against a background
which is not an object, the present lying between two horizons of
absence, past and future. But, he will go on, these significations are
derivative. The ‘figure’ and the ‘background’, the ‘thing’ and its
‘surrounding’, the ‘present’ and the ‘past’, are words which sum¬
marize the experience of a spatio-temporal perspective, which in the
end comes down to the elimination either of memory or of the
marginal impressions. Even though, once formed in actual percep¬
tion, structures have more meaning than is apparent in quality, I
am not entitled to regard this evidence of consciousness as adequate;
I must reconstruct theoretically these structures with the aid of the

‘association’ and thb ‘projection of memories’

impressions whose actual relationships they express. On this footing
empiricism cannot be refuted. Since it rejects the evidence of intro¬
spection and produces, by associating external impressions, the
structures which we are conscious of understanding by proceeding
from the whole to its parts, there is no phenomenon which can be
adduced as a crucial proof against it. Generally speaking, the
description of phenomena does not enable one to refute thought
which is not alive to its own existence, and which resides in things.
The physicist’s atoms will always appear more real than the historical
and qualitative face of the world, the physico-chemical processes
more real than the organic forms, the psychological atoms of
empiricism more real than perceived phenomena, the intellectual
atoms represented by the ‘significations’ of the Vienna Circle more
real than consciousness, as long as the attempt is made to build up
the shape of the world (life, perception, mind) instead of recognizing,
as the source which stares us in the face and as the ultimate court of
appeal in our knowledge of these things, our experience of them. The
adoption of this new way of looking at things, which reverses the
relative positions of the clear and the obscure, must be undertaken by
everyone, whereupon it will be seen to be justified by the abundance
of phenomena which it elucidates. Before its discovery, these pheno¬
mena were inaccessible, yet to the description given of them empiric¬
ism can always retort that it does not understand. In this sense, reflec¬
tion is a system of thought no less closed than insanity, with this
difference that it understands itself and the madman too, whereas the
madman does not understand it. But though the phenomenal field
may indeed be a new world, it is never totally overlooked by natural
thought, being present as its horizon, and the empiricist doctrine
itself is an attempt to analyse consciousness. By way of guarding
against myths it is, then, desirable to point out everything that is
made incomprehensible by empiricist constructions and all the basic
phenomena which they conceal. They hide from us in the first place
‘the cultural world’ or ‘human world’ in which nevertheless almost
our whole life is led. For most of us, Nature is no more than a vague
and remote entity, overlaid by cities, roads, houses and above all by
the presence of other people. Now, for empiricism, ‘cultural’ objects
and faces owe their distinctive form, their magic power, to trans¬
ference and projection of memory, so that only by accident has the
human world any meaning. There is nothing in the appearance of a
landscape, an object or a body whereby it is predestined to look ‘gay’
or sad , lively or dreary’, ‘elegant’ or ‘coarse’. Once more seeking
a definition of what we perceive through the physical and chemical
properties of the stimuli which may act upon our sensory apparatus,
empiricism excludes from perception the anger or the pain which [

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

nevertheless read in a face, the religion whose essence I seize in
some hesitation or reticence, the city whose temper I recognize in the
attitude of a policeman or the style of a public building. There can
no longer be any objective spirit : mental life withdraws into isolated
consciousnesses devoted solely to introspection, instead of extend¬
ing, as it apparently does in fact, over human space which is made
up by those with whom I argue or live, filling my place of work or
the abode of my happiness. Joy and sadness, vivacity and obtuseness
are data of introspection, and when we invest landscapes or other
people with these states, it is because we have observed in ourselves
the coincidence between these internal perceptions and the external
signs associated with them by the accidents of our constitution.
Perception thus impoverished becomes purely a matter of knowledge,
a progressive noting down of qualities and of their most habitual
distribution, and the perceiving subject approaches the world as the
scientist approaches his experiments. If on the other hand we admit
that all these ‘projections’, all these ‘associations’, all these ‘trans¬
ferences’ are based on some intrinsic characteristic of the object, the
‘human world’ ceases to be a metaphor and becomes once more what
it really is, the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts. The
perceiving subject ceases to be an ‘acosmic’ thinking subject, and
action, feeling and will remain to be explored as original ways of
positing an object, since ‘an object looks attractive or repulsive
before it looks black or blue, circular or square’.1

But not only does empiricism distort experience by making the
cultural world an illusion, when in fact it is in it that our existence
finds its sustenance. The natural world is also falsified, and for the
samfi reasons. What we object to in empiricism is not its having
taken this as its primary theme of analysis. For it is quite true that
every cultural object refers back to a natural background against
which it appears and which may, moreover, be confused and remote.
Our perception senses how near is the canvas underneath the picture,
or the crumbling cement under the building, or the tiring actor
under the character. But the nature about which empiricism talks
is a collection of stimuli and qualities, and it is ridiculous to pre¬
tend that nature thus conceived is, even in intention merely, the
primary object of our perception: it does in fact follow the experience
of cultural objects, or ralher it is one of them. We shall, therefore,
have to rediscover the natural world too, and its mode of existence,
which is not to be confused with that of the scientific object. The
phenomenon of the background's continuing under the figure, and
being seen under the figure — when in fact it is covered by the figure —
a phenomenon which embraces the whole problem of the presence of
1 Koffka, The Growth of the Mind, p. 320.

‘association’ and the ‘projection of memories’

the object, is equally obscured by empiricist philosophy, which
treats this covered part of the background as invisible (in virtue of a
physiological definition of vision) and brings it down to the status of a
mere sensible quality by supposing that it is provided by an image,
that is, by a watered-down sensation. In more general terms, the
real objects which are not part of our visual field can be present to
us only as images, and that is why they are no more than ‘permanent
possibilities of sensations’. If we abandon the empiricist postulate of
the priority of contents, we are free to recognize the strange mode of
existence enjoyed by the object behind our back. The hysterical child
who turns round ‘to see if the world behind him is still there’,1
suffers from no deficiency of images, but the perceived world has lost
for him that original structure which ensures that for the normal
person its hidden aspects are as indubitable as are its visible ones.
Once again the empiricist can always build up, with psychic atoms,
near equivalents of all these structures. But the inventory of the
perceived world given in the following chapters will increasingly show
it up as a kind of mental blindness, and as the system least able to
give an inclusive account of experience as it is revealed to us, while
on the other hand reflection embraces empiricism’s subordinate
truth and assigns to it its proper place.

1 Scheler, Mole der Selbsterkenntnis , p. 85.

‘ATTENTION’
AND ‘JUDGEMENT’

THE discussion of traditional prejudices has so far been directed
against empiricism, but in fact it was not empiricism alone that we
were attacking. We must now show that its intellectualist antithesis
is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective
world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in
time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of ex¬
pressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness con¬
stitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception,
instead of sticking closely to it.

This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of
attention. It is deduced, in empiricist thinking, from the ‘constancy
hypothesis’, or, as we have explained, from the priority of the
objective world. Even if what we perceive does not correspond to
the objective properties of the source of the stimulus, the constancy
hypothesis forces us to admit that the ‘normal sensations’ are
already there. They must then be unperceived, and the function
which reveals them, as a searchlight shows up objects pre-existing in
the darkness, is called attention. Attention, then, creates nothing,
and it is a natural miracle, as Maiebranclie to all intents and pur¬
poses said, which strikes up like sparks just those perceptions or
ideas capable of providing an answer to the questions which I was
asking. Since ‘bemerken’ or taking notice is not an efficient cause of
the ideas which this act arouses, it is the same in all acts of attention,
just as the searchlight’s beam is the same whatever landscape be
illuminated. Attention is therefore a general and unconditioned
power in the sense that at any moment it can be applied indifferently
to any content of consciousness. Being everywhere barren, nowhere
can it have its own purposes to fulfil. In order to relate it to the life of
consciousness, one would have to show how a perception awakens

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

attention, then how attention develops and enriches it. Some internal
connection would have to be described, and empiricism has at its dis¬
posal only external ones, and can do no more than juxtapose states
of consciousness. The empiricist’s subject, once he has been allowed
some initiative — which is the justification for a theory of attention —
can receive only absolute freedom. Intellectualism, on the other
hand, starts with the fruitfulness of attention: since I am conscious
that through attention I shall come by the truth of the object, the
succession of pictures called up by attention is not a haphazard one.
The new appearance of the object assigns to the previous one a sub¬
ordinate place, and expresses all that its predecessor was trying to
communicate. The wax is from the start a fragment of extension
both pliable and alterable; I simply realize this clearly or confusedly
‘according as my attention is applied more or less to the things which
are in it and of which it is composed’.1 Since in attention I experience
an elucidation of the object, the perceived object must already con¬
tain the intelligible structure which it reveals. If consciousness finds a
geometrical circle in the circular form of a plate, it is because it had
already put the circle there. For it to gain possession of the know¬
ledge brought by attention, it is enough for it to come to itself again,
in the sense in which a man is said to come to himself again after
fainting. On the other hand, inattentive or delirious perception is a
semi-torpor, describable only in terms of negations, its object has no
consistency, the only objects about which one can speak being those
of waking consciousness. It is true that we carry with us, in the shape
of our body, an ever-present principle of absent-mindedness and
bewilderment. But our body has not the power to make us see what
is not there; it can only make us believe that we see it. The moon on
the horizon is not, and is not seen to be, bigger than at its zenith: if
we look at it attentively, for example through a cardboard tube or a
telescope, we see that its apparent diameter remains constant.2 In¬
attentive perception contains nothing more and indeed nothing other
than the attentive kind. So philosophy need attach no importance to
any credit which appearance may be thought to enjoy. Clear con¬
sciousness, freed from the obstacles which it was prepared to create,
the real world purged of any admixture of daydreams, are there for
everyone. We are not called upon to analyse the act of attention as a
passage from indistinctness to clarity, because the indistinctness is
not there. Consciousness does not begin to exist until it sets limits
to an object, and even the phantoms of internal experience’ are
possible only as things borrowed from external experience. There¬
fore consciousness has no private life, and the only obstacle it

1 2nd Meditation , AT, IX, p. 25.

2 Alain, Systeme des Beaux-Arts , p. 343.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

encounters is chaos, which is nothing. But, in a consciousness which
constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the in¬
telligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist conscious¬
ness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract
and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Conscious¬
ness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding
than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness
brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relation¬
ship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change
its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once
more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes
and specific directions of intention’.1 Finally, the act of attention is
unconditioned, for it has all objects at its disposal, as was the
‘bemerken’ of the empiricists, because in relation to that all objects
were transcendent. How could an object, distinguished by its
presence, call forth an act of attention, since consciousness in¬
cludes all objects? Where empiricism was deficient was in any
internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers
off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency in the occasions of
thought. In the first case consciousness is too poor, in the second too
rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism
cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise
we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that
we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again
we should not be searching. They are in agreement in that neither
can grasp consciousness in the act of learning, and that neither
attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still
‘empty’ but already determinate intention which is attention itself.
Whether attention gets what it wants by ever-renewed miracles or
whether it possesses it in advance, in both cases silence is maintained
over the production of the object. Whether it be a collection of
qualities or a system of relationships, no sooner does it exist than it
must be pure, transparent, impersonal— not imperfect— a truth for
one moment of my life and of my knowledge as it emerges into con¬
sciousness. Perceptual consciousness is confused with the exact
forms of scientific consciousness and the indeterminate does not
enter into the definition of the mind. In spite of the intentions of
intellectualism, the two doctrines, then, have this idea in common
that attention creates nothing, since a world of impressions in itself
or a universe of determining thought are equally independent of the
action of mind.

Against this conception of an inactive subject, the analysis of

1 Cassirer, Philosophic der symbolischen Formen , t. Ill, Phanomenologie der
Erkenrtlnis , p. 200.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

attention by the psychologists acquires the value of self-discovery,
and the criticism of the ‘constancy hypothesis’ develops into a
criticism of the dogmatic belief in the ‘world’ seen as a reality in
itself by empiricists, and as the immanent end of knowledge by
intellectualists. Attention first of all presupposes a transformation
of the mental field, a new way for consciousness to be present to
its objects. Take the act of attention whereby I locate a point on my
body which is being touched. The analysis of certain disorders
having their origin in the central nervous system, and which make
such an identification impossible, reveals tiie profound workings of
consciousness. Head has spoken casually of *a local weakening of
attention’. It is in reality neither a question of one or more ‘local
signals’, nor of the collapse of a secondary power of apprehension.
The primary condition of the disorder is a disintegration of the
sensory field which no longer remains stable while the subject per¬
ceives, but moves in response to the exploratory movements and
shrinks while it is being probed.1 A vaguely located spot is a contra¬
dictory phenomenon and reveals a pre-objective space where there is
extension, since several points on the body touched together are not
confused by the subject, but as yet no univocal position, because no
spatial framework, persists from one perception to another. The
first operation of attention Is, then, to create for itself a field, either
perceptual or mental, which can be ‘surveyed’ ( iiberschauen ), in
which movements of the exploratory organ or elaborations of
thought are possible, but in which consciousness docs not corre¬
spondingly lose what it has gained and, moreover, lose itself in the
changes it brings about. The precise position of the point touched
will be the invariable factor among the various feelings that I ex¬
perience according to the dispositions of my limbs and body. The
act of attention can localize or objectify this invariable factor be¬
cause it has stepped back from the changes of appearance. Attention,
therefore, as a general and formal activity, does not exist.2 There is in
each case a certain liberty to be acquired, and a certain mental space
to make the most of. It remains to bring to light the object of atten¬
tion itself. There it is literally a question of creation. For example,
it has long been known that during (he first nine months of life,
infants distinguish only globally the coloured from the colourless;
thereafter coloured areas form into ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ shades, and
finally the detailed colours are arrived at. But psychologists3 would
concede here no more than that ignorance or the confusion of names

1 J. Stein, Ober (tie Verdnderungen der Sinnesleist ungen und die Entstehung von
Trugwahrnehmmigen , pp. 362 and 383.

* E. Rubin, Die Nichtexistem der Aufmerksantkeit,

* Cf. Peters, Zur Entwkkehmg der Farbenwahntehmung, pp. 152-3.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

prevents the child from distinguishing colours. The child must, it
was alleged, see green where it is; all he was failing to do was to pay
attention and apprehend his own phenomena. The reason for these
assertions was that psychologists were not yet able to conceive a
world in which colours were indeterminate, or a colour which was
not a precise quality. The criticism of these prejudices, on the other
hand, allows the world of colours to be perceived as a secondary
formation, based on a series of ‘physiognomic* distinctions: that
between the ‘warm* and ‘cold’ shades, that between the ‘coloured’
and the ‘non-coloured’. We cannot compare these phenomena,
which take the place of colour in children, to any determinate quality,
and in the same way the ‘strange’ colours seen by a diseased person
cannot be identified with any colour of the spectrum.1 The first
perception of colours properly speaking, then, is a change of the
structure of consciousness,2 the establishment of a new dimension of
experience, the setting forth of an a priori .

Now attention has to be conceived on the model of these origi¬
nating acts, since secondary attention, which would be limited to
recalling knowledge already gained, would once more identify it
with acquisition. To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate
pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by
taking them as figures? They are preformed only as horizons , they
constitute in reality new regions in the total world. It is precisely the
original structure which they introduce that brings out the identity
of the object before and after the act of attention. Once the colour-
quality is acquired, and only by means of it, do the previous data
appear as preparations of this quality. Once the idea of an equation
has been acquired, equal arithmetical quantities appear as varieties
of the same equation. It is precisely by overthrowing data that the
act of attention is related to previous acts, and the unity of conscious¬
ness is thus built up step by step through a ‘synthesis of transition’.
The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through
attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a
new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. Thus atten¬
tion is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of
thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution
of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until
then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon. At the
same time as it sets attention in motion, the object is at every
moment recaptured and placed once more in a state of dependence
on it. It gives rise to the ‘knowledge-bringing event’, which is to

1 Cf. supra, p. 9.

8 Koehler, Vber unbemerkte Empfittdungen . . ., p. 52.

8 Koffka, Perception , pp. 561 and if.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

transform it, only by means of the still ambiguous meaning which it
requires that event to clarify; it is therefore the motive1 and not the
cause of the event. But at least the act of attention is rooted in the
life of consciousness, and one can finally understand how it emerges
from its liberty of indifference and gives itself a present object. This
passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this recasting at
every moment of its own history in the unity of a new meaning, is
thought itself. ‘The work of the mind exists only in act.’2 The result
of the act of attention is not to be found in its beginning. If the moon
on the horizon appears to me no bigger than at the zenith, when I
look at it through a telescope or a cardboard tube, the conclusion3
cannot be drawn that in free vision equally its appearance is in¬
variable. This is what empiricism believes, because it is not con¬
cerned with what we see, but with what we ought to see, according
to the retinal image. It is also what intellectualism believes because it
describes de facto perception according to the data of ‘analytic’ and
attentive perception, in which the moon in fact resumes its true
apparent diameter. The precise and entirely determinate world is
still posited in the first place, no longer perhaps as the cause of our
perceptions, but as their immanent end. If the world is to be possible,
it must be implied in the first adumbration of consciousness, as the
transcendental deduction so forcibly brings out.4 And that is why
the moon on the horizon should never appear bigger than it is.
Psychological introspection, on the contrary, makes us put the
correct world back into its cradle of consciousness, and ask how
the very idea of the world or of exact truth is possible, and look for
its first appearance in consciousness. When I look quite freely
and naturally, the various parts of the field interact and motivate
this enormous moon on the horizon, this measureless size which
nevertheless is a size. Consciousness must be faced with its
own unreflective life in things and awakened to its own history
which it was forgetting: such is the true part that philosophical
reflection has to play, and thus do we arrive at a true theory of
attention.

Intellectualism set out, it is true, to discover by reflection the
structure of perception, instead of explaining it in terms of a
combination of associative forces and attention, but its gaze upon

1 E. Stein, Beitrdge zur philosophischen Begrundung der Psychologie und der
Geisteswissenschaften , pp. 35 and ff.

2 Valery, Introduction a la pottique, p. 40.

8 As Alain does, Systime des Beaux- Arts, p. 343.

4 The following pages will make clearer in what respects Kantian philosophy
is, in Husserl's language, a ‘worldly* and dogmatic philosophy. Cf. Fink,
Die ph&nomenologtsche Philosophic Husserls in der gegenwdrtigen Krilik, pp. 531
and IT.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

perception is not yet direct. This will be seen better by examining the
role played in its analysis by the notion of judgement . Judgement is
often introduced as what sensation lacks to make perception possible .
Sensation is no longer presupposed as a real element of consciousness.
But when it is desired to delineate the structure of perception, it is
done by joining up the points of sensation. Analysis is then domi¬
nated by this empiricist notion which, however, is accepted only as
the boundary of consciousness and serves merely to throw into relief
a power of co-ordination of which it is itself the antithesis. Intel-
lectualism thrives on the refutation of empiricism, and here judge¬
ment often has the job of offsetting the possible dispersal of sensa¬
tions.1 Analytical reflection makes its position firm by carrying to
their logical conclusions the realist and empiricist theses, and vali¬
dating their opposite by showing their absurdity. But in the reductio
ad absurdum no contact is necessarily made with the actual workings
of consciousness. It remains possible that the theory of perception,
ideally starting from a blind intuition, may end compensatorily with
some empty concept, and that judgement, the counterpart of pure
sensation, may degenerate into a general function of indiscriminate
union with its objects, or even become once more a psychic force
detectable in its effects. The famous analysis of the piece of wax
jumps from qualities such a smell, colour and taste, to the power of
assuming an infinity of forms and positions, a power which lies
beyond the perceived object and defines only the wax of the physicist.
For perception there is no wax left when all its sensible properties
have vanished, and only science supposes that there is some matter
which is preserved. The ‘perceived’ wax itself, with its original
manner of existing, its permanence which is not yet the exact identity
of science, its ‘interior horizon’2 of possible variation of shape and
size, its dull colour suggestive of softness, which in turn suggests the
dull sound I shall get when I pat it, in short, the perceptual structure
of the object, are lost sight of, because specifications of a predicative
kind are needed to link up objective and hermetically sealed qualities.
The men I see from a window are hidden by their hats and coats, and
their image cannot be imprinted on my retina. I therefore do not see
them, I judge them to be there. 3 Once vision is defined in the empiric¬
ist way as the possession of a quality impressed upon the body by the

1 ‘Hume’s nature needed Kantian reason and Hobbes’ man needed Kant’s
practical reason if both were to approximate to the actual, natural experience we
have of them.’ Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik , p. 62.

'l Cf. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil , e.g., p. 172.

3 Descartes, 2nd Meditation , T do not fail to say that I see men, just as I say
I see wax; yet what do I see from the window, except hats and coats which may
cover ghosts or dummies worked by springs ? Yet I judge them to be real men . . .’
AT, IX, p. 25.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

stimulus,1 the least illusion, endowing the object as it does with
properties which it does not possess on my retina, is sufficient to
establish that perception is a judgement,® As I have two eyes, I
ought to see the object double, and if I see only one of it, that is
because I construct by means of two images the idea of one object a
distance away.® Perception becomes an ‘interpretation’ of the signs
that our senses provide in accordance with the bodily stimuli* a
‘hypothesis’ that the mind evolves to ‘explain its impressions to
itself \* But judgement also, brought in to explain the excess of per¬
ception over the retinal impressions, instead of being the act of
perception itself grasped from within by authentic introspection,
becomes once more a mere ‘factor’ of perception, responsible for
providing what the body does not provide— instead of being a
transcendental activity, it becomes simply a logical activity of
drawing a conclusion.® In this way we are drawn away from reflection,

1 ‘Here too relief seems obvious; yet it is concluded from an appearance
which bears no resemblance to a relief, namely from a difference between the
appearances presented to our two eyes by the same things.* Alain, Qnaire-
vingt-un chapitres sur V esprit el ks passions t p. 39. Moreover Alain (ibid., p. 17)
refers to the Physiological O pitas of Hclmholz in which the constancy hypothesis
is always assumed, and where judgement intervenes only to fill the gaps in
physiological explanation. Cf, again ibid., p, 23, 'It is fairly obvious that in the
case of this forest horizon, sight presents it to us not as remote but as bluish, by
reason of the intervening layers of air,1 This is logically entailed if we define siglu
by its bodily stimulus or by the possession of a quality, for then it can give us
blueness but not distance, which is a relationship. But it is not strictly speaking
obvious, that is, attested by consciousness. Consciousness is in fact astonished to
discover in the perception of distance relations which precede all assessment,
calculation or conclusion.

2 ‘What proves hero that I judge is that painters know perfectly how to provide
me with the perception of a distant mountain by imitating its appearance on a
canvas/ Alain, ibid., p. 14.

3 ‘We sec objects double because we have two eyes, but we pay no attention to
these double images except in order to gain from them knowledge about the
distance or relief of the unique object which they afford our perception/ Lagneau,
Cikbres Le$om\ p. 105. And generally ‘we must first of all look for the elementary
sensations which belong to the nature of the human mind ; the human body repre¬
sents this nature’. Ibid., p. 75. T have met a person*, says Alain, ‘who was not pre¬
pared to admit that our eyes present us with two images of each thing: it is, how¬
ever, sufficient to fix our eyes on a fairly close object such as a pencil to sec that
the images of distant objects arc immediately doubled / (Quatre-vingnm cftapiires,
pp, 23-4.) That does not prove that they were double beforehand. Here can be
seen the prejudice in favour of the law of constancy which demands that pheno¬
mena corresponding to bodily impressions be given in places where they are not
observed.

4 ’Perception is an interpretation of the primitive intuition, an interpretation

apparently immediate, but in reality gained from habit corrected by reason¬
ing . . /, Lagneau, Cikbres Lemons, p. 158. * Id. ibid., p. 160.

a Cf. for example Alain, Quatre-vingt-un chapkres, p. 15: Relief is ‘thought,
concluded, judged, or however you like to put if.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

and we construct perception instead of revealing its distinctive
working; we miss once more the basic operation which infuses
significance into the sensible, and which is taken for granted by any
logical mediation or any psychological causality. The result is that
intellectualist analysis eventually makes nonsense of the perceptual
phenomena which it is designed to elucidate. While judgement loses
its constitutive function and becomes an explanatory principle, the
words ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘feel5 lose all their meaning, since the least
significant vision outruns the pure impression and thus comes under
the general heading of ‘judgement’. Ordinary experience draws a
clear distinction between sense experience and judgement. It sees
judgement as the taking of a stand, as an effort to know something
which shall be valid for myself every moment of my life, and equally
for other actual or potential minds; sense experience, on the con¬
trary, is taking appearance at its face value, without trying to
possess it and learn its truth. This distinction disappears in intel-
lectualism, because judgement js everywhere where pure sensation
is not — that is, absolutely everywhere. The evidence of phenomena
will therefore everywhere be challenged.

A large cardboard box seems heavier to me than a small one
made of the same cardboard, and if I confined myself to phenomena
I should say that I can in advance feel it heavier in my hand. But
mtellcctualism delimits sense experience by the action of a real
stimulus on my body. Since here there is none, we have to say that
the box is not felt but judged to be heavier, and this example which
seemed ready-made to show the sensory aspect of illusion serves on
the contrary to prove that there is no sensory knowledge, and that
we feel as we judge.1 A cube drawn on paper changes its appearance
according as it is seen from one side and from above or from the
other and from below. Even if I know that it can be seen in two ways,
the figure in fact refuses to change its structure and my knowledge
must await its intuitive realization. Here again one ought to con¬
clude that judging is not perceiving. But the alternatives of sensation
and judgement force us to say that the change in the figure, since it
does not depend on the ‘sensible elements’ which, like the stimuli,
remain constant, can only depend on a change of interpretation, and
that ‘the mind’s conception modifies perception itself’,2 ‘appearance
assumes form and meaning to order’.3 Now if we see what we judge,
how can we distinguish between true and false perception? How will
it then be possible to say that the sufferer from hallucinations or the
madman ‘think they see what they do not see’?4 Where will be the

1 Alain, Quatre-vingt-un chap it res, p. 18.

2 Lagneau, Celebres Lemons, pp. 132 and 128. 8 Alain, ibid., p. 32.

4 Montaigne, quoted by Alain, Systeme des Beaux-Arls , p. 15.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking one sees’? Tf the reply is
made that the sane man judges only by adequate signs and completely
coherent material* it is, then, because there is a difference between
the motivated judgement of veridical perception and the empty
judgement of false perception. And as the difference is not in the
form of the judgement but in the sensible text to which it gives form,
to perceive in the full sense of the word (as the antithesis of imagin¬
ing) is not to judge* it is to apprehend an immanent sense in the
sensible before judgement begins. The phenomenon of true percep¬
tion offers* therefore* a meaning inherent in the signs* and of which
judgement is merely the optional expression. Intellectualism can
make comprehensible neither this phenomenon nor the imitation
which illusion gives of it. More generally it is blind to the mode of
existence and co-existence of perceived objects, to the life which
steals across the visual field and secretly binds its parts together. In
Zdllner’s optical illusion* I ‘see’ the main lines converging. Intel-
lectualism simply reduces the phenomenon to a mistake* saying that
it all comes of my bringing in the auxiliary lines and their relation to
the main ones, instead of comparing the main lines themselves.
Basically I mistake the task given to me, and I compare the two
wholes instead of comparing the principal elements.1 My mistake
apparently remains unexplained. The question ought to arise: How
does it come about that it is so difficult in Zdllner’s illusion to com¬
pare the same straight lines in isolation that have to be compared
according to the task set? Why do they thus refuse to be separated
from the auxiliary lines?2 It should be recognized that acquiring
auxiliary lines, the main lines have ceased to be parallel, that they
have lost that meaning and acquired another* that the auxiliary lines
introduce into the figure a new meaning which henceforth clings to it
and cannot be shifted .a It is this meaning inseparable from the figure,
this transformation of the phenomenon* which causes the false
judgement and which is so to speak behind it. It is at the same time
this meaning which gives a sense to the word ‘see’ on the hither side
of judgement and on the far side of the quality or impression, and
causes the problem of perception to reappear. If we agree to call
any perception of a relationship a judgement and to keep the term
visual impression for the atomic impression* then certainly illusion
is a judgement But this analysis presupposes at least in theory a

1 Cf. for example Lagncau, Cifibres Legom\ p, 134.

a Koehler, Vber unbemerkle Empfmdungen und UrteilstUuschungen, p. 69.

3 Koffka, Psychologic t p, 533 : ‘One is tempted to say: the side of a rectangle is
after all just a line. But an isolated line, both as a phenomenon and as a func¬
tional element, is something other than the side of a rectangle. To limit ourselves
to one property, the side of a rectangle has an inner and an outer face, the
isolated line on the other hand has two faces absolutely equivalent/

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

layer of impressions in which the main lines are parallel, as they are
in the world, that is, in the physical environment which we measure
— and a second-order operation which changes the impressions by
bringing in auxiliary lines, thus distorting the relationships of the
principal lines. Now the first of these phases is purely conjectural,
and with it the judgement which produces the second. We construct
the illusion, but we do not understand it. Judgement in this very
general and quite formal sense explains perception, true or false,
only when it is guided by the spontaneous organization and the
special mode of arrangement of the phenomena. It is true that the
illusion consists in involving the principal elements in the figure in
auxiliary relationships which break up the parallelism. But why do
they break it up? Why is it that two straight lines so far parallel
cease to make a pair and begin to converge by reason of the immedi¬
ate surroundings provided? It is as if they no longer belonged to the
same world. Two genuinely oblique lines are situated in the same
space which is objective space. But these do not actually converge
upon each other, and it is impossible to see them in this way if the
eyes are fixed on them. It is when we look away from them that they
move insidiously towards this new relationship. There is here, pre¬
ceding objective relationships, a perceptual syntax constructed
according to its own rules : the breaking of old relationships and the
establishment of new ones — judgement — express merely the result of
this complex operation and place it on record. True or false, in this
way must perception first be constituted for predication to be
possible. It is quite true that the distance from us of an object, or its
relief, are not properties of the object as are its colour or its weight.
It is true that they are relations introduced into a total grouping
which, moreover, includes weight and colour. But it is untrue that
this grouping is effected through an ‘inspection of the mind’. It
would follow from this that the mind runs over isolated impressions
and gradually discovers the meaning of the whole as the scientist dis¬
covers the unknown factors in virtue of the data of the problem.
Now here the data of the problem are not prior to its solution,
and perception is just that act which creates at a stroke, along with
the cluster of data, the meaning which unites them — indeed which
not only discovers the meaning which they have , but moreover causes
them to have a meaning.

It is true that these criticisms are valid only against the first
stages of analytical reflection, and intellectualism might reply that
one is forced at the beginning to talk the language of common sense.
The conception of judgement as a psychic force or a logical mediator,
and the theory of perception as ‘interpretation’ — the intellectualism
of the psychologists — is indeed simply a counterpart of empiricism,

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

but it paves the way to true self-discovery. One can begin only with
a natural attitude, complete with its postulates, until the internal
dialectic of these postulates destroys them. Once perception is
understood as interpretation, sensation, which has provided a
starting-point, is finally superseded, for all perceptual consciousness
is already beyond it. The sensation is not experienced,1 and con¬
sciousness is always consciousness of an object. We arrive at sensa¬
tion when we think about perceptions and try to make it clear that
they are not completely our work. Pure sensation, defined as the
action of stimuli on our body, is the ‘last effect’ of knowledge, par¬
ticularly of scientific knowledge, and it is an illusion (a not unnatural
one, moreover) that causes us to put it at the beginning and to
believe that it precedes knowledge. It is the necessary, and necessarily
misleading way in which a mind sees its own history.® It belongs to
the domain of the constituted and not to the constituting mind.
Perception can appear as an interpretation either according to the
world or according to opinion. For consciousness itself how could
it be a process of reasoning since there are no sensations to provide
it with premises, or an interpretation, because there is nothing prior
to it to interpret? At the same time as we thus discard, along with
the idea of sensation, that of a purely logical activity, our foregoing
objections disappear. We asked what seeing or feeling arc, what
makes this knowledge still involved in its object, and inherent in one
point of time and space, distinct from the concept. But reflection
shows that there is nothing here to understand. It is a fact that I
believe myself to be first of all surrounded by my body, involved in
the world, situated here and now. But each of these words, when 1
come to think about them, is devoid of meaning, and therefore raises
no problem : would I perceive myself as ‘surrounded by my body’ iT 1
were not in it as well as being in myself, if 1 did not myself conceive
this spatial relationship and thus escape inherence at the very instant
at which i conceive it? Would l know that 1 am caught up and situ¬
ated in the world, if I were truly caught up and situated in it? 1
should then merely be where 1 was, as a thing, and since 1 know where
I am and see myself among things, it is because I am a consciousness,
a strange creature which resides nowhere and can be everywhere
present in intention. Everything that exists exists as a thing or as a
consciousness, and there is no half-way iiouse. The thing is in a

1 ‘In fact the pure impression is conceived and not felt.’ Lagneau, Celebrex
Legom , p. 119.

s 'When we have evolved this notion by scientific knowledge and reflection, we
think that what is in fact the last effect of the process of knowing, namely the
expression of die relationship between one being and others, is the beginning;
but this is an illusion. The idea of time which leads us to think of sensation as
anterior to knowledge, is a construction of the mind/ ItL ibid.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

place, but perception is nowhere, for if it were situated in a place it
would not cause other things to exist for itself, since it would lie in
itself after the manner of things. Perception is thus thought about
perceiving. Its incarnation furnishes no positive characteristic which
has to be accounted for, and its thisness (ecceity) is simply its own
ignorance of itself. Analytical reflection becomes a purely regressive
doctrine, according to which every perception is a muddled form of
intellection, and every setting of bounds a negation; It thus does
away with all problems except one: that of its own beginning. The
finitude of a perception which gives me, as Spinoza expressed it,
‘consequences without premises’, the inherence of consciousness in
a point of view, these things amount to my ignorance of myself, to
my negative power of not reflecting. But how is this ignorance
possible? we want to ask. To reply that it never is, would be to
abolish me as an inquiring philosopher. No philosophy can afford
to be ignorant of the problem of finitude under pain of failing to
understand itself as philosophy; no analysis of perception can afford
not to conceive perception as a totally original phenomenon under
pain of misconceiving itself as analysis, and the infinite thought dis¬
covered as immanent in perception would not be the culminating
point of consciousness, but on the contrary a form of unconscious¬
ness. The introspective drive would overshoot its goal: it would
transport us from a fixed and determinate world to consciousness
without a rift in it, whereas the perceived object is infused with
secret life, and perception as a unity disintegrates and reforms cease¬
lessly. We shall have only an abstract essence of consciousness as
long as we refrain from following the actual movement by which it
resumes its own operations at every instant, focusing and con¬
centrating them on an identifiable object, gradually passing from
‘seeing’ to ‘knowing’ and achieving the unity of its own life. We shall
not reach this constitutive dimension if we replace the plenary unity
of consciousness by a completely transparent subject, and the
‘hidden art’ which calls up meaning from ‘the depths of nature’, by
some eternal thought. The intellectualist process of self-discovery
does not penetrate as far as this living nucleus of perception because
it is looking for the conditions which make it possible or without
which it would not exist, instead of uncovering the operation which
brings it into reality, or whereby it is constituted. In actual perception
taken at its origin, before any word is uttered, the sign offered to
sense and the meaning are not even theoretically separable. An object
is an organism of colours, smells, sounds and tactile appearances
which symbolize, modify and accord with each other according to
the laws of a real logic which it is the task of science to make explicit,
and which it is far from having analysed completely. Intellectualism

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

is unequal to dealing with this perceptual life, either falling short of
it or overshooting it: it calls up as limitations the manifold qualities
which are merely the outer casing of the object, and from there it
passes on to a consciousness of the object which claims to hold
within itself the law or secret of that object, and which for this
reason deprives the development of the experience of its contingency
and the object of its distinctive perceptual style. This move from
thesis to antithesis, this flying from one extreme to the other which
is the regular procedure of intellectualism leaves the starting-point of
analysis unaffected. We started off from a world in itself which acted
upon our eyes so as to cause us to see it, and we now have conscious¬
ness of or thought about the world, but the natpre of this world re¬
mains unchanged : it is still defined by the absolute mutual exteriority
of its parts, and is merely duplicated throughout its extent by a
thought which sustains it. We pass from absolute objectivity to
absolute subjectivity, but this second idea is no better than the first
and is upheld only against it, which means by it. The affinity between
intellectualism and empiricism is thus much less obvious and much
more deeply rooted than is commonly thought. It arises not only
from the anthropological definition of sensation used equally by
both, but from the fact that both persist in the natural or dogmatic
attitude, and the survival of sensation in intellectualism is merely a
sign of this dogmatism. Intellectualism accepts as completely valid
the idea of truth and the idea of being in which the formative work of
consciousness culminates and is embodied, and its alleged reflection
consists in positing as powers of the subject all that is required to
arrive at these ideas. The natural attitude, by throwing me into the
world of things, gives me the assurance of apprehending a ‘real’
beyond appearance, the ‘true’ beyond illusion. The value of these
notions is not questioned by intellectualism : it is merely a matter of
conferring upon a universal creative force the power of recognizing
this same absolute truth that realism ingenuously places in a given
creation. Intellectualism no doubt normally sets itself up as a doctrine
of science and not of perception, purporting to base its analysis on
the test of mathematical truth and not on the naive acceptance of the
self-evidence of the world: habemus ideam veram . But in reality I
would not know that I possess a true idea if my memory did not
enable me to relate what is now evident with what was evident a
moment ago, and, through the medium of words, correlate my
evidence with that of others, so that the Spinozist conception of the
self-evident presupposes that of memory and perception. If, on the
other hand, we insist on basing our constitution of the past and of
other people on our power of recognizing the intrinsic truth of the
idea, we do away with the problem of others and that of the world,

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

but then only because we persist in the natural attitude which takes
them for granted, and because we put into action the force of naive
certainty. For never, as Descartes and Pascal realized, can I at one
stroke coincide with the pure thought which constitutes even a
simple idea. My clear and distinct thought always uses thoughts
already formulated by myself or others, and relies on my memory,
that is, on the nature of my mind , or else on the memory of the com¬
munity of thinkers, that is, upon the objective mind. To take for
granted that we have a true idea is to believe in uncritical perception.
Empiricism retained an absolute belief in the world as the totality of
spatio-temporal events, and treated consciousness as a province of
this world. Analytical reflection, it is true, breaks with the world in
itself, since it constitutes it through the working of consciousness,
but this constituting consciousness, instead of being directly appre¬
hended, is built up in such a way as to make possible the idea of an
absolute determinate being. It is the correlative of a universe, the
subject possessing in absolutely completed form all the knowledge
which is adumbrated by our actual knowledge. What happens is that
what exists for us only in intention is presumed to be fully realized
somewhere : there is thought to be a system of absolutely true
thoughts, capable of co-ordinating all phenomena, a flat projection
which clarifies all perspectives, a pure object upon which all sub¬
jective views open. Nothing less than this absolute object and this
divine subject are needed to ward off the threat of the malicious
demon and to ensure that we possess the true idea. Now there is one
human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to
reach complete truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of
knowledge of existences. When I begin to perceive this table, I
resolutely contract the thickness of duration* which has elapsed
while I have been looking at it; I emerge from my individual life by
apprehending the object as an object for everybody, I therefore bring
together in one operation concordant but discrete experiences which
occupy several points of time and several temporalities. We do not
blame intellectualism for making use of this decisive act which,
within time, does the work of the Spinozist eternity, this ‘original
doxa’;1 what we do complain of, is that it is here used tacitly. There
is here a factual power, as Descartes put it, a quite irresistibly self-
evident truth, which, by invoking an absolute truth, brings together
the separate phenomena of my present and my past, of my duration *
and that of others, which, however, must not be severed from its
perceptual origins and detached from its ‘facticity’. Philosophy’s
task is to reinstate it in the private field of experience from which it
* duree in the Bergsonian sense (Translator’s note).

1 Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil , e.g., p. 331.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

arises and elucidate its origin. If, however, it is used without being
explicitly posited, we become incapable of seeing the phenomenon of
perception and the world which arises in it through the dismembered
elements represented by separate experiences; we dissolve the per¬
ceived world in a universe which is notiling but this very world cut off
from its constitutive origins, and made manifest because they are
forgotten.

Thus inlelfcctualism leaves consciousness on a footing of famili¬
arity with absolute being, while the idea of a world in itself persists
as a horizon or as the clue to analytical reflection. Doubt has cer¬
tainly interrupted the explicit assertions concerning the world, but
leaves untouched its insidious presence, even though it be sub¬
limated into the ideal realm of absolute truth. Reflection, then,
furnishes an essence of consciousness, which is accepted dogmatic¬
ally, and no one wonders what an essence is, or whether the essence
of thought adequately covers the fact of thought. It loses the char¬
acter of observation and henceforth there can be no question of
describing phenomena: the perceptual appearance of illusions is
challenged as the illusion of illusions; now only what is can be seen,
the view itself and experience being no longer distinct from concep¬
tion. Hence a philosophy in part dual, and observable in any doctrine
of the understanding: a leap is undertaken from a naturalistic view,
which expresses our de facto condition, to a transcendental sphere in
which all bondage is theoretically removed, and we never have to
wonder how the same subject comes to be a part of the world and at
the same time its principle because the thing constituted exists only
for the constituting agent. In fact, the image of a constituted world
where, with my body, I should be only one object among others, and
the idea of an absolute constituting consciousness are only appar¬
ently antithetical; they are a dual expression of a universe perfectly
explicit in itself. Authentic reflection, instead of turning from one
to the other as both true, in the manner of the philosophy of under¬
standing, rejects them as both false.

It is true that we are perhaps once more distorting intellectualism.
When we say that analytical reflection anticipates all possible know¬
ledge over and above what we at present know, that it includes
reflection in its results and abolishes the phenomenon of finitude,
perhaps we are caricaturing intellectualism, and offering in its name
a world-centred reflection, a truth as seen by the prisoner in the cave
who prefers the shadows to which he is accustomed and who does not
understand that they owe their existence to the light. Perhaps we
have not yet understood the real function of judgement in perception.
The analysis of the piece of wax means, one may say, not that there
is a reason hidden behind nature, but that reason is rooted in nature;

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

the ‘inspection of the mind’ is then not the concept gravitating to¬
wards nature, but nature rising to the concept. Perception is a judge¬
ment, which, however, is unaware of the reasons underlying its own
formation,1 which amounts to saying that the perceived object
presents itself as a totality and a unity before we have apprehended
the intelligible law governing it, and that the wax is not originally a
pliable and alterable bit of extension. When he says that natural
judgement has not ‘time to weigh and consider any reasons’,
Descartes lets us know that by the word ‘judgement’ he is thinking
of the constitution of a meaning for the thing perceived which is not
prior to the perception itself and which seems to emanate from it.2
The vital knowledge or ‘natural inclination’ which shows us the
union of body and soul, once the light of nature has taught us to
distinguish them, is a thing which it seems contradictory to guarantee
by divine truthfulness; for this is after all nothing but the intrinsic
clarity of the idea, and can in any case validate only self-evident
thoughts. But perhaps Descartes’ philosophy requires the acceptance
of this contradiction.3 When Descartes says that the understanding
knows itself incapable of knowing the union of soul and body and
leaves this knowledge for life to achieve,4 this means that the act of
understanding presents itself as reflection on an unreflective ex¬
perience which it does not absorb either in fact or in theory. When I
discover the intelligible structure of the piece of wax, I do not
identify myself with some absolute thought in relation to which the
wax is a mere result, I do not constitute it, I re-constitute it. ‘Natural
judgement’ is nothing but the phenomenon of passivity. It will
always be the task of perception to know perception. Reflection
never lifts itself out of any situation, nor does the analysis of per¬
ception do away with the fact of perception, the thisness of the
percept or the inherence of perceptual consciousness in some
temporality and some locality. Reflection is not absolutely trans¬
parent for itself, it is always given to itself in an experience , in the
Kantian sense of the word, it always springs up without itself know-

1 ‘. . . I noticed that the judgements which I was accustomed to make about
these objects were formed within me before I had time to weigh and consider any
reasons which might have forced me to make them.’ 6th Meditation , AT, IX,

p. 60.

a \ . . it seemed to me that I had learnt from nature all the other things that I
judged concerning the objects of my senses . . / ibid.

3 £. . . since it did not seem to me that the human mind was capable of con¬
ceiving distinctly and simultaneously the distinction between soul and body and
their union, for in that case it would be necessary to conceive them as a single
thing and at the same time as two things, which is contradictory/ To Elizabeth,
28th June, 1643, AT, III, p. 690 and ff.

4 Ibid.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

ing whence it springs and offers itself to me as a gift of nature. But if
the description of the unreflective experience remains valid after
reflection and the Sixth Meditation after the Second , conversely this
unreflective experience is known to us only through reflection and
cannot be posited outside itself as an unknowable final stage. Be¬
tween the self which analyses perception and the self which perceives,
there is always a distance. But in the concrete act of introspection,
I abolish this distance, I prove in fact that I am capable of knowing
what I perceived , I control in practice the discontinuity of the two
selves, and it would seem that, in the last resort, the significance of
the cogito lies not in revealing a universal constituting force or in
reducing perception to intellection, but in establishing the fact of
reflection which both pierces and sustains the opacity of perception.
It would be quite consistent with the Cartesian intention to have
thus identified reason and the human condition, and it might be
held that the ultimate significance of Cartesianism is to be found
here. The ‘natural judgement’ of intellectualism in this case antici¬
pates the Kantian judgement which places the origin of the in¬
dividual object’s meaning in the object itself, and does not see it as
imposed ready-made.1 Cartesianism, like Kantianism, would seem
to have seen quite clearly that the problem of perception resides in its
being an originating knowledge. There is an empirical or second-
order perception, the one which we exercise at every moment, and
which conceals from us the former basic phenomenon, because it is
loaded with earlier acquisitions and plays, so to speak, on the surface
of being.

When I glance at the objects surrounding me in order to find my
bearings and locate myself among them, I can scarcely be said to
come within reach of the world’s instantaneous aspect. I identify
here the door, there the window, over there my table, all of which
are the props and guides of a practical intention directed elsewhere,
and which are therefore given to me simply as meanings. But when I
contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist
and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion
to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not
merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, re¬
enacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some
element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize
the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning,

1 The faculty of judging ‘must, then, itself provide a concept, which in reality
does not bring knowledge of any thing, and which serves as a rule only for itself,
not an objective rule to which its judgement is to be adapted; for then would be
needed another faculty of judging in order to be able to discern whether this is or
is not a case to which the rule applies.’ ( Critique of Judgement, Preface.)

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all
over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to
outline the individual idea of this tree. Such would be natural
judgement, which cannot yet know its reasons since it is in process of
creating them. But even if we grant that existence, individuality,
‘facticity’ are on the horizon of Cartesian thought, there remains the
question whether it has posited them. Now we must recognize that it
could have done so only by transforming itself radically. To make
perception into an original knowledge, we should have had to endow
finitude with a positive significance and take seriously the strange
phrase in the 4th Meditation which makes me ‘a middle term between
God and nothingness’. But if nothingness is without properties, as
the 5th Meditation leads one to understand, and as Malebranche
asserts, if it is nothing , this definition of the human subject is merely
a manner of speaking and the finite has nothing positive about it.
In order to see in reflection a creative deed, a reconstitution of past
thought which was not prefigured in it and which yet validly par¬
ticularizes it, because it alone furnishes us with an idea of it and
because the past in itself is for us as if it had never been — it would
have been necessary to develop an intuition of time to which the
Meditations contain only a brief allusion. ‘Let who will deceive me,
the fact remains that he cannot cause me to be nothing when I think
I am something; or cause it to be true one day that I have never existed ,
since it is, true that I now exist'1 The experience of the present is that
of a being assured of his existence once and for all, whom nothing
could ever prevent from having been. In the certitude of the present,
there is an intention which outruns the presentness of the present,
which posits it in advance as an indubitable ‘former present’ in the
series of recollections, and perception as knowledge of the present is
the central phenomenon which makes possible the unity of the ego
and with it the ideas of objectivity and truth. But in the text it is
given merely as one of those self-evidences which are irresistible only
de facto , and which remain in doubt.2 The Cartesian solution is
therefore not to accept as a guarantee of itself human thought in its
factual reality, but to base it on a thought which possesses itself
absolutely. The connection between essence and existence is not
found in experience, but in the idea of the infinite. It is, then, true
in the last resort that analytical reflection entirely rests on a dogmatic
idea of being, and that in this sense it is not a consummate act of
self-discovery.3

1 3rd Meditation , AT, IX, p. 28.

2 On the same footing as 2 and 3 make 5. Ibid.

3 Following its own line, analytical reflection does not bring us back to authen¬
tic subjectivity; it conceals from us the vital node of perceptual consciousness

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

When intellectualisxn took over the naturalistic notion of sensa¬
tion, a whole philosophy was implied in the step. Conversely, now
that psychology finally discards this notion, we can look forward, in
consequence, to the beginning of a new type of reflection. On the

because it looks for the conditions in which absolutely determinate being is
possible, and is dazzled by the theological view, falsely regarded as self-evident,
that nothingness is nothing. The philosophers who practised this method, how¬
ever, have always felt that it was necessary to search beneath absolute conscious¬
ness. We have just seen that this is so in the case of Descartes. One could show it
equally with Lagneau and Alain.

Analytical reflection carried to its limit should leave on the subject’s side only
a universal creative force for which the system of experience exists, including my
body and my empirical self, linked to the world by the laws of physics and psycho¬
physiology. The sensation which we construct as the ‘psychic1 extension of the
sensory stimuli obviously does not belong to the universal force and all idea of a
genesis of mind is a hybrid idea, because it puts back into time the mind for which
time exists, and confuses the two selves. Nevertheless, if we are this absolute mind,
without a history, and if nothing stands between us and the true world, if the
empirical self is constituted by the transcendental ego and set out before it, we
ought to pierce its opacity, and it is not possible to see how error is possible, still
less illusion — the ‘abnormal perception1 which no knowledge can conjure away.
(Lagneau, Cilebres Legons , pp. 161-2.) It can be said (ibid.) that illusion and per¬
ception in its entirety are on this side of both truth and error. This does not help
us to solve the problem, since it then becomes one of knowing how a mind can
be ‘on this side of1 truth and error. When we feel, we do not perceive our sensation
as object in a network of psycho-physiological relationships. We do not possess
the truth of sensation. We are not confronted by the true world. ‘It amounts to
the same thing to say either that we are individuals or to say that in these indi¬
viduals there is a sentient nature in which something happens which is not a result
of the action of the environment. If everything in our sentient nature were subject
to necessity, if there were for us a manner of feeling which was the true one, if at
every moment our manner of feeling were produced by the external world, we
should not feel at all.1 ( Celebres Legons , p. 164.) Thus feeling does not belong to
the order of the constituted, nor does the ego find this order set out before it, it
escapes from its gaze, it is as it were piled up behind it and produces a kind of
thickness or opacity which makes error possible, it marks out an area of subjec¬
tivity or solitude, it represents for us what is ‘anterior to1 the mind, evokes the
latter’s birth and calls for a more searching analysis capable of elucidating ‘the
genealogy of logic1. The mind is conscious of itself as ‘based1 on this nature.
There is therefore a dialectic of the naturata and of the naturans , of perception and
judgement, in the course of which their relationship is reversed.

The same tendency is to be found in Alain in the analysis of perception. One
realizes that a tree always looks bigger than a man, even if it is at a distance and
the man near. I am tempted to say that ‘Here again a judgement enlarges the
object. But let us look more closely. The object is unchanged because an object in
itself has no size; size is always relative, and so the size of these objects and of all
objects forms an indivisible whole and one truly without parts. Sizes must be
judged together. From which it is seen that one must not confuse material things,
always separate and made up of mutually external parts, and the thought of these
things, in which no division can be admitted. However obscure this distinction
may be now, and however difficult it must always remain to conceive it, let us keep

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

psychological level, the criticism of the ‘constancy hypothesis’ means
merely that the judgement is abandoned as an explanatory factor in
the theory of perception. How can we pretend that the perception of
distance is a conclusion reached from the apparent size of objects,
from the disparity between retinal images, from the adjustment of
the crystalline lens, from the varying convergence of the eyes; or
that the perception of relief is a conclusion drawn from the difference
between the images furnished respectively by the left and right eyes,
since, if we stick to phenomena, none of these ‘signs’ is clearly given
to consciousness, and since there could be no reasoning where the
premises are lacking? But this criticism of intellectualism is relevant
only to its popularization by psychologists. And, like intellectualism
itself, it has to be transferred to the level of reflection, where the
philosopher is no longer trying to explain perception, but to coincide
with and understand the perceptual process. Here the criticism of the
constancy hypothesis reveals that perception is not an act of under¬
standing. I have only to look at a landscape upside down to recog¬
nize nothing in it. Now ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ have only a relative mean¬
ing for the understanding, which can hardly regard the orientation
of the landscape as an absolute obstacle. For the understanding a
square is always a square, whether it stands on a side or an angle.
For perception it is in the second case hardly recognizable. The
Pnrndox of sytyi :Ti ctviccil objects contrasted the originality of per¬
ceptual experience with logicism. This idea has to be taken up and
generalized: there is a significance of the percept which has no

it in mind. In a sense, considered materially, things are divided into parts of which
one is not another; but in another sense, considered as thoughts, perceptions of
things are indivisible and without parts.1 {Quaite -vingt-un chapitrcs sur V Esprit et
les Passions, p. 18.) But then an inspection of the mind which surveyed them and
established one in virtue of the other would not be true subjectivity and would
borrow too much from things considered as in themselves. Perception does not
draw conclusions about the size of the tree from that of the man, or about the
man's size from the tree’s, nor either from the meaning of the two objects; it does
all these things at once: the size of the tree, that of the man, and their significance
as tree and man, with the result that each element agrees with all the others and
composes with them a landscape in which all co-exist. Thus do we broach the
analysis of what makes size possible, and more generally the relations or proper¬
ties of the predicative order, and we broach that subjectivity 'prior to all geo¬
metry1 which Alain nevertheless declared unknowable, (Ibid., p. 29.) Analytical
reflection becomes more strictly conscious of itself as analysis. It becomes aware
that it had left behind its object, perception. It recognizes behind the judgement
which it had brought into evidence, a deeper function than judgement which
makes judgement possible; it rediscovers, before arriving at things, phenomena.
This is the function envisaged by psychologists when they talk about a Gestaltung
of the landscape. It is to the description of phenomena that they redirect the
philosopher, by separating them rigidly from the constituted objective world, and
they do it in terms which are almost identical with Alain’s.

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain
which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not
yet determinate being. However, the psychologists who practise the
description of phenomena are not normally aware of the philo¬
sophical implications of their method. They do not see that the return
to perceptual experience, in so far as it is a consequential and radical
reform, puts out of court all forms of realism, that is to say, all
philosophies which leave consciousness and take as their datum one
of its results — that the real sin of intellectualism lies precisely in
having taken as its datum the determinate universe of science, that
this reproach applies a fortiori to psychological thinking, since it
places perceptual consciousness in the midst of a ready-made world,
and that the attack on the constancy hypothesis carried to its logical
conclusion assumes the value of a genuine ‘phenomenological
reduction’.1 Gestalt theory has clearly shown that the alleged signs of
distance — the apparent size of the object, the number of objects
interposed between it and us, the disparity of retinal images, the
degree of adjustment and convergence — are expressly known only in
an analytic or reflective perception which turns away from the object
to its mode of presentation, and that we do not go through these
stages in knowing distances. Nevertheless, it goes on to conclude
that, not being signs or reasons in our perception of distance, bodily
impressions or the interposed objects in the field can only be causes
of this perception.2 So we are back in an explanatory psychology,
the ideal of which has never been abandoned by Gestalt psychology,3
because, as psychology, it has never broken with naturalism. But
by this very fact it betrays its own descriptions. A subject whose
oculo-motor muscles are paralysed sees objects moving to his left
when he thinks that he is himself turning his eyes towards the left.
This, classical psychology maintains, is because perception reasons :
the eye is supposed to swing to the left, and since nevertheless the
retinal images have not moved, the view must have slipped leftwards
to have kept them in place in the eye. Gestalt theory informs us that
the perception of the position of objects does not pass through the
detour of an express body-consciousness : at no moment do I know
that the images remain stationary on the retina; I see directly the
landscape move to the left. But consciousness is not confined to
receiving ready-made an illusory phenomenon produced outside it¬
self by physiological causes. For the illusion to be produced, the

1 See A. Gurwitsch, Recension of Nachwort zu mciner Ideen of Husserl, pp.
401 and ff.

2 Cf. for example P. Guillaume, Trait e de Psychologies Chap. IX, La Perception
de VEspace, p. 151.

3 Cf. La Structure du Comportement , p. 178.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

subject must have intended to look to the left and must have thought
he moved his eye. The illusion regarding the subject’s body involves
the appearance of movement in the object. The movements of his
body are naturally invested with a certain perceptual significance,
and form, with the external phenomena, such a well articulated system
that external perception ‘takes account’ of the movement of the
organs of perception, finding in them if not the express explanation ,
at least the motive for the changes brought about in the spectacle,
and thus being able to understand them instantly. When I intend to
look left, this movement of the eye carries within it as its natural
translation a vacillation of the visual field: the objects' remain in
place, but after a moment’s fluctuation. This consequence is not
learnt, but is one of the natural procedures of the psychosomatic
subject. It is, as we shall see, an annex of our ‘body image’, the
immanent meaning of a changed direction of the ‘gaze’. When it
stops short of such a change, when we are conscious of moving our
eyes without the view’s being affected, the phenomenon is trans¬
lated, without any express deduction, by an apparent shift of the
object leftwards. The gaze and the landscape remain as it were stuck
together, no start dissociates them, and the gaze, in its illusory move¬
ment, carries with it the landscape, and the latter’s sideslip is funda¬
mentally nothing but its fixity in a gaze which we think is moving.
Thus the immobility of images on the retina and the paralysis of
the oculo-motor muscles are not objective causes which produce the
illusion and carry it ready-made into consciousness. Nor are the
intention to move the eye and the landscape’s passivity in relation
to this impulse premises or reasons for the illusion. But they are the
motives. In the same way, the objects interposed between me and the
thing upon which I fix my eyes are not perceived for themselves;
they are nevertheless perceived, and we have no reason for refusing to
recognize that this marginal perception plays a part in seeing dis¬
tance, since, when the intervening objects are hidden by a screen, the
distance appears to shrink. The objects filling up the field do not act
on the apparent distance in the relation of cause to effect. When the
screen is removed, we see remoteness born of the intervening objects.
This is the silent language whereby perception communicates with
us:' interposed objects, in the natural context, ‘mean’ a greater
distance. It is not, however, a question of a connection recognized
by objective logic, the logic of constituted truth: for there is no
reason why a steeple should appear to me lo be smaller and farther
away when I am better able to see in detail the slopes and fields
between me and it. There is no reason, but there is a motive. It is
precisely Gestalt psychology which has brought home to us the
tensions which run like lines of force across the visual field and the

‘attention’ and ‘judgement’

system constituted by my own body and the world, and which
breathe into it a secret and magic life by exerting here and there
forces of distortion, contraction and expansion. The disparity be¬
tween retinal images, and the number of intermediate objects do not
act either as mere objective causes producing from outside my
perception of distance, or as demonstrative reasons for it. They are
tacitly known to perception in an obscure form, and they validate it
by a wordless logic. But what Gestalt psychology lacks for the
adequate expression of these perceptual relationships is a set of new
categories: it has admitted the principle, and applied it to a few
individual cases, but without realizing that a complete reform of
understanding is called for if we are to translate phenomena
accurately; and that to this end the objective thinking of classical
logic and philosophy will have to be questioned, the categories of
the world laid aside, the alleged self-evidence of realism placed in
doubt, in the Cartesian spnse, and a true ‘phenomenological reduc¬
tion’ undertaken. Objective thought, as applied to the universe and
not to phenomena, knows only alternative notions; starting from
actual experience, it defines pure concepts which are mutually
exclusive: the notion of extension, which is that of an absolute
externality of one part to another, and the notion of thought which
is that of a being wrapped up in himself ; the notion of the vocal sign
as a physical phenomenon arbitrarily linked to certain thoughts, and
that of meaning as a thought entirely clear to itself; the notion of
cause as a determining factor external to its effect, and that of reason
as a law of intrinsic constitution of the phenomenon. Now, as we
have seen, the perception of our own body and the perception of
external things provide an example of non-positing consciousness,
that is, of consciousness not in possession of fully determinate
objects, that of a logic lived through which cannot account for itself,
and that of an immanent meaning which is not clear to itself and be¬
comes fully aware of itself only through experiencing certain natural
signs. These phenomena cannot be assimilated by objective thought,
and that is why Gestalt psychology which, like all psychology, is
imprisoned within the ‘self-evident truths’ of science and of the
world, can choose only between reason and cause, and that is why
any criticism of intellectualism which it undertakes ends with the
rehabilitation of realism and causal thinking. On the other hand,
the phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those ‘fluid’1
1 ‘fiieszende’, Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil , p. 428. It was not until his last
period that Husserl himself became fully aware of what the return to phenomena
meant, and tacitly broke with the philosophy of essences. He was in this way
merely explicitly laying down analytic procedures which he had long been apply¬
ing, as is precisely shown by the notion of motivation to be found already in the
Ideen.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

concepts which have to be formed if we want to get back to pheno¬
mena. One phenomenon releases another, not by means of some
objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events,
but by the meaning which it holds out — there is an underlying reason
for a' thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being
explicitly laid down in any one of them, a sort of operative reason.
Thus the intention to look to the left and the fact that the landscape
remains stubbornly fixed in one’s gaze bring about the illusion of
movement in the object. In proportion as the motivated phenomenon
comes into being, its internal relationship to the motivating pheno¬
menon appears, and instead of merely following upon the latter, it
makes it explicit and comprehensible, so that it seems to have
existed before its own motive. Thus the object at a distance and its
physical projection on the retinas explain the disparity of images,
and, through a retrospective illusion, we speak with Malebranche
about a natural geometry of perception. We place beforehand within
perception a science constructed upon it, and we lose sight of the
original relationship of motivation, in which distance springs into
existence ahead of any science, not from a judgement on ‘the two
images’, for these are not numerically distinct, but from the pheno¬
menon of the ‘blurred’ photographic effect, from the forces which
reside in this rough outline, which are trying to come to rest and
which endow it with the most determinate form/ possible. To a
Cartesian doctrine, these descriptions will never have any philo¬
sophic importance: they will be treated as allusions to unreflective
states of mind, which, by their nature, can never become articulate
and which, like any form of psychology, are without truth in the eyes
of the understanding. In order to admit them completely, it would be
necessary to show that in no case can consciousness entirely cease
to be what it is in perception, that is, a fact, and that it cannot take
full possession of its operations. The recognition of phenomena,
then, implies a theory of reflection and a new cogito.1

1 See below, Part III. Formalism has adopted a kind of reflection the theory of
which is furnished by Husserl’s phenomenology. Are we wrong to discern a whole
philosophy implicit in the criticism of the ‘constancy hypothesis’? Although we
are not here concerned with history, it may be pointed out that the affinity of
Gestalt psychology and phenomenology is equally attested by external similari¬
ties. It is no chance occurrence that Kohler should propose, as the task of psy¬
chology, ‘phenomenological description’ (Uber unbemerkte Empfinchmgen und
Urteihtauschungen , p. 70). Or that Koflfka, a former disciple of Husserl, should
trace the leading ideas of his psychology back to this influence, and try to show
that the attack on psychologism leaves Gestalt psychology untouched ( Principles
of Gestalt Psychology , pp. 614-83), the Gestalt being, not a mental event of the
type of an impression, but a whole which develops a law of internal coherence.
Or that finally Husserl, in his last period, still further away from logicism, which
he had moreover attacked along with psychologism, should have taken up the

* ATTENTION* AND JUDGEMENT’

notion of ‘configuration* and even of Gestalt (cf. Die Krisis der cttropaischen
Wismischafien and die tramzendmak Phdnomenohgk, I, pp. 106, 109). What Is
true is that the reaction against naturalism and against causal thinking is, in
Gestalt psychology, neither consequential, nor radical, as can be seen from the
naive realism of its theory of knowledge (cf. La Structure du Comportementt jx
180). Gestalt psychology cannot sec that psychological atomism is only one par¬
ticular case of a more general prejudice; the prejudice of determinate being or of
the world, and that is why it forgets its most valid descriptions when it tries to
provide itself with a theoretical framework. It is unexceptionable only in the
middle regions of reflection. When it tries to reflect on its own analysis, it treats
consciousness, despite its principles, as a collection of ‘forms*. This is enough to
justify Husserl** criticisms expressly directed against formalism, but applicable
to all psychology (Nachwort zu twiner Ideen, pp. 564 and IT.) at a time when he
was still distinguishing fact and essence, when he had not yet arrived at the idea
of historical constitution, and when, consequently, he was stressing the break,
rather than the parallelism, between psychology and phenomenology. We have
quoted elsewhere (La Structure (fit Comportement, p. 280) a text of E. Fink
restoring the balance. As for the fundamental question, which is that of the trans¬
cendental attitude in relation to the natural attitude, it will not be possible to
settle it until we reach the last part of this work, where we shall examine the
transcendental meaning of time.

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

IT will now be seen in what direction the following chapters will
carry their inquiry, ‘Sense experience’* has become once more a
question for us. Empiricism had emptied it of all mystery by bringing
it down to the possession of a quality. This had been possible only at
the price of moving far from the ordinary acceptation of the word.
Between sense experience and knowing, common experience estab¬
lishes a difference which is not that between the quality and the
concept. This rich notion of sense experience is still to be found in
Romantic usage, for example in Herder, It points to an experience in
which wc are given not ‘dead’ qualities, but active ones. A wooden
wheel placed on the ground is not* for sight, the same thing as a
wheel bearing a load, A body at rest because no force is being
exerted upon it is again for sight not the same thing as a body in
which opposing forces are in equilibrium.1 The light of a candle
changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops
attracting the child’s hand and becomes literally repulsive.2 The
vision is already inhabited by a significance which gives it a function
in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale
would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one’s
own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself
acquainted-3 Sense experience, on the other hand, invests the quality
with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for that heavy
mass which is our body, whence it comes about that it always in¬
volves a reference to the body. The problem is to understand these
strange relationships which are woven between the parts of the
landscape, or between it and inc as incarnate subject, and through
which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene or
become the imago of a whole segment of life. Sense experience is that
vital communication with the world which makes it present as a

* The original French word is ‘le sentir’ (Translator’s note).

1 Koffka, Perception, an Introduction to the Gestalt Theory , pp. 558-9.

2 Id., Mental Development, p. 138.

3 Schcler, Die Wissenformen und die Gesellschaft, p. 408.

THF PIIFNOMFNAI, FIFLD

familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the
perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue
which the effort to know will try to take apart. With the problem of
sense experience, we rediscover that of association and passivity.
They have ceased to be problematical because the classical philo¬
sophies put themselves either below or above them, giving them
everything or nothing: sometimes association was understood as a
mere de facto co-existence, sometimes derived from an intellectual
construction; sometimes passivity was imported from things into the
mind, and sometimes analytical reflection would find in it an activity
of understanding. Whereas these notions take on their full meaning
if sense experience is distinguished from quality: then association, or
rather ‘affinity4, in the Kantian sense, is the central phenomenon of
perceptual life, since it is the constitution, without any ideal model,
of a significant grouping. The distinction between the perceptual life
and the concept, between passivity and spontaneity is no longer
abolished by analytical reflection, since we are no longer forced by
the atomism of sensation to look to some connecting activity for our
principle of all co-ordination. Finally, after sense experience, under¬
standing also needs to be redefined, since the general connective
function ultimately attributed to it by Kantianism is now spread over
the whole intentional fife and no longer suffices to distinguish it. We
shall try to bring out in relation to perception, both the instinctive sub¬
structure and the superstructures erected upon it by (he exercise of
intelligence. As Cassirer puts it, by mutilating perception from above,
empiricism mutilated it from below too : 1 the impression is as devoid of
instinctive and affective meaning as of ideal significance. One might
add that mutilating perception from below, treating it immediately as
knowledge and forgetting its existential content, a mounts to mutilating
it from above, since it involves Caking for granted and passing over
in silence the decisive moment in perception: the upsurge of a true
and accurate world. Reflection will be sure of having precisely located
the centre of the phenomenon if it is equally capable of bringing to
light its vital inherence and its rational intention.

So, ‘sensation’ and ‘judgement’ have together lost their apparent
clearness: we have observed that they were clear only as long as the
prejudice in favour of the world was maintained. As soon as one
tried by means of them, io picture consciousness in the process of
perceiving, to revive the forgotten perceptual experience, and to
relate them to it, they were found to be inconceivable. By dint of
making these difficulties more explicit, we were drawn implicitly into
a new kind of analysis, into a new dimension in which they were

1 Cassirer, Philosophic der symbolischen Formen, T. Ill, Phanomenologie der
Erke/mtnis, pp. 77-8.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

destined to disappear. The criticism of the constancy hypothesis
and more generally the reduction of the idea of ‘the world’ opened up
a phenomenal field which now has to be more accurately circum¬
scribed, and suggested the rediscovery of a direct experience which
must be, at least provisionally, assigned its place in relation to
scientific knowledge, psychological and philosophical reflection.

Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by un¬
questioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to
things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a
truth in itself in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be
found. The tacit assumption of perception is that at every instant
experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and
that of the following, and my perspective with that of other con¬
sciousnesses— that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic
and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text — that what is
now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more
complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the
thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely
the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes per¬
ceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields
and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the
means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a
theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and
ipso facto defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal
components the processes actually observed. It established statistic¬
ally the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these
those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of
creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the
world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents,
that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties
of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence
in which each event could be related to physical conditions respon¬
sible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this
freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus
developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not
aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because
perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical
thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered
necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was
therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being
possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of deter¬
minant consciousness,1 even if it were conceded that the constitution
of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what
1 As L. Brunschvicg does.

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us
and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general pro¬
perties. It was no use denying any ontologicat value to the principles
of science and leaving them with only a methodical value,1 for this
reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was con¬
cerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific
method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not
escape the determinations which alone made the object into an
object and without which it would have had no place in the system of
experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgement
confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of
physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a
fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the
smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of
expression which presents the human body as the outward mani¬
festation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechan¬
istic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.

It was necessary to link to centripetal conditions the centrifugal
phenomenon of expression, reduce to third person processes that
particular way of dealing with the world which we know as be¬
haviour, bring experience down to the level of physical nature and
convert the living body into an interioriess thing. The emotional
and practical attitudes of the living subject in relation to the world
were, then, incorporated into a psycho-physiological mechanism.
Every evaluation had to be the outcome of a transfer whereby com¬
plex situations became capable of awakening elementary impressions
of pleasure and pain, impressions bound up, in turn, with nervous
processes. The impelling intentions of the living creature were con¬
verted into objective movements: to the will only an instantaneous
fiat was allowed, the execution of the act being entirely given over to
a nervous mechanism. Sense experience, thus detached from the
affective and motor functions, became the mere reception of a
quality, and physiologists thought they could follow, from the
point of reception to the nervous centres, the projection of the
external world in the living body. The latter, thus transformed,
ceased to be my body, the visible expression of a concrete Ego, and
became one object among all others. Conversely, the body of another
person could not appear to me as encasing another Ego. It was
merely a machine, and the perception of the other could not really be
of the other , since it resul ted from an inference and therefore placed
behind the automaton no more than a consciousness in general, a
transcendent cause and not an inhabitant of his movements. So wc
no longer had a grouping of factors constituting the self co-existing

1 Cf. for example, L'Experience humaine et la Causalite physique, p. 536.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

in a world. The whole concrete content of ‘psychic states’ resulting,
according to the laws of psychophysiology and psychology, from a
universal determinism, was integrated into the in-itself. There was no
longer any real for-itself other than the thought of the scientist
which perceives the system and which alone ceases to occupy any
place in it. Thus, while the living body became an exterior without
interior, subjectivity became an interior without exterior, an im¬
partial spectator. The naturalism of science and the spiritualism of
the universal constituting subject, to which reflection on science led,
had this in common, that they levelled out experience: in face of the
constituting I, the empirical selves are objects. The empirical Self is
a hybrid notion, a mixture of in-itself and for-itself, to which reflec¬
tive philosophy could give no status. In so far as it has a concrete
content it is inserted in the system of experience and is therefore not
a subject; in so far as it is a subject, it is empty and resolves itself
into the transcendental subject. The ideality of the object, the
objectification of the living body, the placing of spirit in an axio¬
logical dimension having no common measure with nature, such is
the transparent philosophy arrived at by pushing further along the
route of knowledge opened up by perception. It could be held that
perception is an incipient science, science a methodical and com¬
plete perception,1 since science was merely following uncritically the
ideal of knowledge set up by the perceived thing.

Now this philosophy is collapsing before our eyes. The natural
object was the first to disappear and physics has itself recognized the
limits of its categories by demanding a recasting and blending of the
pure concepts which it had adopted. For its part the organism
presents physico-chemical analysis not with the practical difficulties
of a complex object, but with the theoretical difficulty of a meaningful
being.* In more general terms the idea of a universe of thought or a
universe of values, in which ail thinking lives come into contact and
are reconciled, is called into question. Nature is not in itself geo¬
metrical, and it appears so only to a careful observer who contents
himself with macrocosmic data. Human society is not a community
of reasonable minds, and only in fortunate countries where a bio¬
logical and economic balance has locally and temporarily been
struck has such a conception of it been possible. The experience of
chaos, both on the speculative and the other level, prompts us to sec
rationalism in a historical perspective which it set itself on principle
to avoid, »to seek a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason
in a world not of its making and to prepare the substructure of

1 Cf. for example Alain, Quatre-vingt-un chapitres sur /’ Esprit et les Passions,
p. 19, and Brunschvicg, V Experience humaine et la causalite physique, p. 468.

2 Cf.- La Structure du Comportement, and below, First Part.

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

living experience without which reason and liberty are emptied of
their content and wither away. We shall no longer hold that per¬
ception is incipient science, but conversely that classical science is a
form of perception which loses sight of its origins and believes itself
complete. The first philosophical act would appear to be to return to
the world of actual experience which is prior to the objective world,
since it is in it that we shall be able to grasp the theoretical basis no
less than the limits of that objective world, restore to things their
concrete physiognomy, to organisms their individual ways of dealing
with the world, and to subjectivity its inherence in history, Our task
will be, moreover, to rediscover phenomena, the layer of living
experience through which other people and things are first given to
us, the system Self-others-things’ as it comes into being; to re¬
awaken perception and foil its trick of allowing us to forget it as a
fact and as perception in the interest of the object which it presents
to us and of the rational tradition to which it gives rise.

This phenomenal field is not an ‘inner world’, the ‘phenomenon’ is
not a ‘state of consciousness’, or a ‘mental fact’, and the experience
of phenomena is not an act of introspection or an intuition in
Bergson’s sense. It has long been the practice to define the object of
psychology by saying that it was ‘without extension’ and ‘accessible
to one person only’, with the result that this peculiar object could be
grasped only by means of a special kind of act, ‘internal perception’
or introspection, in which subject and object were mingled and
knowledge achieved by an act of coinciding. The return to the
‘immediate data of consciousness’ became therefore a hopeless
enterprise since the philosophical scrutiny was trying to be what it
could not, in principle, see. The difficulty was not only to destroy
the prejudice of the exterior, as all philosophies urge the beginner to
do, or to describe the mind in a language made for representing
things. It was much more fundamental, since inferiority, defined by
the impicssion, by its nature evaded every attempt to express it. It
was not only the imparting of philosophical intuitions to others
which became difficult— or rather reduced itself to a sort of incanta¬
tion designed to induce in them experiences comparable to the
philosopher’s— but the philosopher himself could not be clearly
aware of what he saw in the instant, since he would have had to think
it, that is fix and distort it. The immediate was therefore a lonely,
blind and mute life. The return to the phenomenal presents none of
these peculiarities. The sensible configuration of an object or a
gesture, which the criticism of tire constancy hypothesis brings
before our eyes, is not grasped in some inexpressible coincidence, it
is understood’ through a sort of act of appropriation which we all
experience when we say that we have ‘found’ the rabbit in the foliage

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

of a puzzle, or that we have ‘caught’ a slight gesture. Once the pre¬
judice of sensation has been banished, a face, a signature, a form of
behaviour cease to be mere ‘visual data’ whose psychological mean¬
ing is to be sought in our inner experience, and the mental life of
others becomes an immediate object, a whole charged with immanent
meaning. More generally it is the very notion of the immediate which
is transformed: henceforth the immediate is no longer the im¬
pression, the object which is one with the subject, but the meaning,
the structure, the spontaneous arrangement of parts. My own
‘mental life’ is given to me in precisely the same way, since the
criticism of the constancy hypothesis teaches me to recognize the
articulation and melodic unity of my behaviour as original data of
inner experience, and since introspection, when brought down to its
positive content, consists equally in making the immanent meaning
of any behaviour explicit.1 2 * Thus what we discover by going beyond
the prejudice of the objective world is not an occult inner world.
Nor is this world of living experience completely closed to naive
consciousness, as is Bergson’s interiority. In criticizing the constancy
hypothesis and in laying bare phenomena, the psychologist, it is
true, runs counter to the natural direction of the process of knowing,
which goes blindly through the operations of perception straight on
to their teleological results. Nothing is more difficult than to know
precisely what we see. ‘There is in natural intuition a sort of “crypto-
mcchanism” which we have to break in order to reach phenomenal
being’4 or again a dialectic whereby perception hides itself from
itself But although it is of the essence of consciousness to forget its
own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’ to be constituted, this forget¬
fulness is not mere absence, it is the absence of something which
consciousness could bring into its presence: in other words con¬
sciousness can forget phenomena only because it can recall them, it
neglects them in favour of things only because they are the cradle of
things. For example they are never completely unknown to scientific
consciousness which simply borrows all its models from the struc¬
tures of living experience; it does not ‘thematize’ them, or make
explicit the horizons of perceptual consciousness which surround it
and to the concrete relationships of which it tries to give objective
expression. Experience of phenomena is not, then, like Bergsonian
intuition, that of a reality or which we are ignorant and leading to
which there is no methodical bridge — it is the making explicit or
bringing to light of the prescientific life of consciousness which alone

1 We shall, consequently, in the following chapters, resort indifferently to the
internal experience of our perception and to the ‘external experience of per¬
ceiving subjects.

2 Scheler, Idole der Selbsterkemtnis, p. 106.

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

endows scientific operations with meaning and to which these latter
always refer back. It is not an irrational conversion, but an inten¬
tional analysis.

If, as we see, phenomenological psychology is distinguished in all
its characteristics from introspective psychology, it is because it is
different in basic principle. Introspective psychology detected, on the
perimeter of the physical world, a zone of consciousness in which
physical concepts are no longer valid, but the psychologist still
believed consciousness to be no more than a sector of being, and he
decided to explore this sector as the physicist explores his. He tried
to describe the data of consciousness but without questioning the
absolute existence of the world surrounding it. In company with the
scientist and common sense, he presupposed the objective world as
the logical framework of all his descriptions, and as the setting of his
thought. He was unaware that this presupposition dominated the
meaning given to the word ‘being’, forcing it to bring consciousness
into existence under the name of ‘psychic fact’, and thus diverting it
from a true grasp of consciousness or from truly immediate ex¬
perience, and stultifying the many precautions taken to avoid dis¬
torting the ‘interior’. This is what happened to empiricism when it
replaced the physical world by a world of inner events. It is again
what happens to Bergson precisely when he contrasts ‘multiplicity of
fusion’ and ‘multiplicity of juxtaposition’. For it is here still a ques¬
tion of two modes of being. All that has happened is that mechanical
energy has been replaced by spiritual, the discontinuous being of
empiricism by being of a fluid kind, but of which we can say that it
flows, describing it in the third person. By taking the Gestalt as the
theme of his reflection, the psychologist breaks with psychologism,
since the meaning, connection and ‘truth’ of the percept no longer
arise from the fortuitous coming together of our sensations as they
are given to us by our psycho-physiological nature, but determine the
spatial and qualitative values of these sensations, and are their
irreducible configuration.1 It follows that the transcendental atti¬
tude is already implied in the descriptions of the psychologist, in so
far as they are faithful ones. Consciousness as an object of study
presents the peculiarity of not being analysable, even naively, with¬
out carrying us beyond common sense postulates. If, for example,
we set out to create a positive psychology of perception, while still
allowing consciousness to be enclosed in the body, and through it
suffer the action of a world in itself, we are led to describe the
object and the world as they appear to consciousness, and in this
way to inquire whether this immediately present world, the only one
we know, may not also be the only one of which there is reason to
1 Cf .La Structure du Comportement , pp. 106-19 and 261.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

speak. A psychology is always brought face to face with the problem
of the constitution of the world.

Psychological reflection, once begun, then, outruns itself through
its own momentum. Having recognized the originality of phenomena
in relation to the objective world, since it is through them that the
objective world is known to us, it is led to integrate with them every
possible object and to try to find out how that object is constituted
through them. At the same time the phenomenal field becomes a
transcendental field. Since it is now the universal focus of knowledge,
consciousness definitely ceases to be a particular region of being, a
certain collection of ‘mental’ contents; it no longer resides or is no
longer confined within the domain of ‘forms’ which psychological
reflection had first recognized, but the forms, like all things, exist
for it. It can no longer be a question of describing the world of
living experience which it carries within itself like some opaque
datum, it has to be constituted. The process of making explicit, which
had laid bare the ‘lived-through’ world which is prior to the objective
one, is put into operation upon the ‘lived-through’ world itself, thus
revealing, prior to the phenomenal field, the transcendental field.
The system ‘self-others-world’ is in its turn taken as an object of
analysis and it is now a matter of awakening the thoughts which con¬
stitute other people, myself as individual subject and the world as a
pole of my perception. This new ‘reduction’ would then recognize
only one true subject, the thinking Ego. This move from naturata to
naturcms , from constituted to constituting, would complete the dis¬
covery of positing reality begun by psychology and would leave
nothing implicit or tacitly accepted in my knowledge. It would
enable me to take complete possession of my experience, thus
equating thinking and thought. Such is the ordinary perspective of a
transcendental philosophy, and also, to all appearances at least, the
programme of a transcendental phenomenology.1 Now the pheno¬
menal field as we have revealed it in this chapter, places a funda¬
mental difficulty in the way of any attempt to make experience
directly and totally explicit. It is true that psychologism has been left
behind, that the meaning and structure of the percept are for us no
longer the mere outcome of psycho-physiological events, that
rationality is no longer a fortunate accident bringing together dis¬
persed sensations, and that the Gestalt is recognized as primary.
But although the Gestalt may be expressible in terms of some in¬
ternal law, this law must not be considered as a model on which the
phenomena of structure are built up. Their appearance is not the
external unfolding of a pre-existing reason. It is not because the

1 It is set forth in these terms in most of Husserl’s works, even in those pub¬
lished during his last period.

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

‘form’ produces a certain state of equilibrium, solving a problem of
maximum coherence and* in the Kantian sense, making a world
possible, that it enjoys a privileged place in our perception; it is the
very appearance of the world and not the condition of its possibility;
it is the birth of a norm and is not realized according to a norm; it is
the identity of the external and the internal and not the projection of
the internal in the external. Although, then, it is not the outcome of
some circulation of mental states in themselves, neither is it an idea.
The Gestalt of a circle is not its mathematical law but its physio¬
gnomy. The recognition of phenomena as an original order is a
condemnation of empiricism as an explanation of order and reason
in terms of a coming together of facts and of natural accidents, but
it leaves reason and order themselves with the character of facticity.
If a universal constituting consciousness were possible, the opacity of
the fact would disappear. If then we want reflection to maintain, in
the object on which it bears, its descriptive characteristics, and
thoroughly to understand that object, we must not consider it as a
mere return to a universal reason and see it as anticipated in un-
reflective experience, we must regard it as a creative operation which
itself participates in the facticity of that experience. That is why
phenomenology, alone of all philosophies, talks about a trans¬
cendental field . This word indicates that reflection never holds,
arrayed and objectified before its gaze, the whole world and the
plurality of monads, and that its view is never other than partial and
of limited power. It is also why phenomenology is phenomenology,
that is, a study of the advent of being into consciousness, instead of
presuming its possibility as given in advance. It is striking how
transcendental philosophies of the classical type never consider the
possibility of effecting the complete disclosure which they always
assume done somewhere . It is enough for them that it should be
necessary, and in this way they judge what is by what ought to be, by
what the idea of knowledge requires. In fact, the thinking Ego can
never abolish its inherence in an individual subject, which knows all
things in a particular perspective. Reflection can never make me stop
seeing the sun two hundred yards away on a misty day, or seeing it
‘rise’ and ‘set’, or thinking with the cultural apparatus with which
my education, my previous efforts, my personal history, have pro¬
vided me. I never actually collect together, or call up simultaneously,
all the primary thoughts which contribute to my perception or to my
present conviction. A philosophy such as the critical attaches in the
last analysis no importance to this resistance offered by passivity, as
if it were not necessary to become the transcendental subject in
order to have the right to affirm it. It tacitly assumes, consequently,
that the philosopher’s thinking is not conditioned by any situation.

TRADITIONAL PREJUDICES AND THE RETURN TO PHENOMENA

Starting from the spectacle of the world, which is that of a nature
open to a plurality of thinking subjects, it looks for the conditions
which make possible this unique world presented to a number of
empirical selves, and finds it in a transcendental ego in which they
participate without dividing it up, because it is not a Being, but a
Unity or a Value, This is why the problem of the knowledge of other
people is never posed in Kantian philosophy: the transcendental
ego which it discusses is just as much other people’s as mine, analysis
is from the start located outside me, and has nothing to do but to
determine the general conditions which make possible a world for an
ego — myself or others equally — and so it never comes up against the
question: who is thinking? If on the other hand contemporary
philosophy takes this as its main theme, and if other people become a
problem for it, it is because it is trying to achieve a more radical
self-discovery. Reflection cannot be thorough-going, or bring a
complete elucidation of its object, if it does not arrive at awareness
of itself as well as of its results. We must not only adopt a reflective
attitude in an impregnable Cogito , but furthermore reflect on this
reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of
succeeding and which is therefore part of its definition; not merely
practise philosophy, but realize the transformation which it brings
with it in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. Only on this

1 rtp KaArtrrt a oKr /\1 nf n lr-rt /mttI a/I

vunuiuun tail jjiiiiuaupiuvai iviiuvvivugC uvvumv auouiutu ivuu witujgt*

and cease to be a speciality or a technique. So there will be no asser¬
tion of an absolute Unity, all the less doubtful for not having to
come into Being. The core of philosophy is no longer an autonomous
transcendental subjectivity, to be found everywhere and nowhere:
it lies in the perpetual beginning of reflection, at the point where the
individual life begins to reflect on itself. Reflection is truly reflection
only if it is not carried outside itself, only if it knows itself as reflec-
tion-on-an-unreflective-experience, and consequently as a change in
structure of our existence. We earlier attacked Bergsonian intuition-
ism and introspection for seeking to know by coinciding. But at the
opposite extremity of philosophy, in the notion of a universal con¬
stituting consciousness, we encounter an exactly corresponding
mistake. Bergson’s mistake consists in believing that the thinking
subject can become fused with the object thought about, and that
knowledge can swell and be incorporated into being. The mistake of
reflective philosophies is to believe that the thinking subject can
absorb into its thinking or appropriate without remainder the object
of its thought, that our being can be brought down to our know¬
ledge. As thinking subject we are never the unreflective subject that
we seek to know; but neither can we become wholly consciousness,
or make ourselves into the transcendental consciousness. If we were

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD

consciousness, we would have to have before us the world, our
history and perceived objects in their uniqueness as systems of trans¬
parent relationships. Now even when we are not dealing with
psychology, when we try to comprehend, in direct reflection and
without the help of the varied associations of inductive thought, what
a perceived movement, or a circle, are, we can elucidate this singular
fact only by varying it somewhat through the agency of imagination,
and then fastening our thought upon the invariable element of this
mental experience. We can get through to the individual only by the
hybrid procedure of finding an example , that is, by stripping it of its
facticity. Thus it is questionable whether thought can ever quite
cease to be inductive, and whether it can assimilate any experience
to the point of taking up and appropriating its whole texture. A
philosophy becomes transcendental, or radical, not by taking its
place in absolute consciousness without mentioning the ways by
which this is reached, but by considering itself as a problem; not by
postulating a knowledge rendered totally explicit, but by recognizing
as the fundamental philosophic problem this presumption on reason’s
part.

That is why we had to begin our examination of perception with
psychological considerations. If we had not done so, we would not
have understood the whole meaning of the transcendental problem,
since we would not, starting from the natural attitude, have
methodically followed the procedures which lead to it. We had to
frequent the phenomenal field and become acquainted, through
psychological descriptions, with the subject of phenomena, if we were
to avoid placing ourselves from the start, as does reflective philo¬
sophy, in a transcendental dimension assumed to be eternally given,
thus by-passing the whole problem of constitution. We had to avoid,
however, beginning our psychological description without suggesting
that once purged of all psychologism it can become a philosophical
method. In order to revive perceptual experience buried under its
own results, it would not have been enough to present descriptions
of them which might possibly not have been understood, we had to
establish by philosophical references and anticipations the point of
view from which they might appear true. Thus we could begin
neither without psychology nor with psychology alone. Experience
anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is merely an elucidated
experience. But now that the phenomenal field has been sufficiently
circumscribed, let us enter this ambiguous domain and let us make
sure of our first steps as far as the psychologist is concerned, until
the psychologist’s self-scrutiny leads us, by way of a second-order
reflection, to the phenomenon of the phenomenon, and decisively
transforms the phenomenal field into a transcendental one.

PART ONE

The Body

Experience and objective thought. The problem
of the body

Our perception ends in objects, and the object once constituted,
appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had
or could have. For example, I see the next-door house from a certain
angle, but it would be seen differently from the right bank of the
Seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane: the house itself
is none of these appearances; it is, as Leibnitz said, the flat pro¬
jection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is,
the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived, the house
seen from nowhere. But what do these words mean? Is not to see
always to see from somewhere? To say that the house itself is seen
from nowhere is surely to say that it is invisible! Yet when I say that
I see the house with my own eyes, I am saying something that cannot
be challenged: I do not mean that my retina and crystalline lens,
my eyes as material organs, go into action and cause me to see it:
with only myself to consult, I can know nothing about this. I am
trying to express in this way a certain manner of approaching the
object, the *gaze’ in short, which is as indubitable as my own thought,
as directly known by me. We must try to understand how vision can
be brought into being from somewhere without being enclosed in its
perspective.

To see an object is either to have it on the fringe of the visual
field and be able to concentrate on it, or else respond to this summons
by actually concentrating upon it. When I do concentrate my eyes on
it, I become anchored in it, but this coming to rest of the gaze is
merely a modality of its movement: I continue inside one object the
exploration which earlier hovered over them all, and in one move¬
ment I close up the landscape and open the object. The two opera¬
tions do not fortuitously coincide: it is not the contingent aspects of
my bodily make-up, for example the retinal structure, which force
me to see my surroundings vaguely if I want to see the object clearly.
Even if I knew nothing of rods and cones, I should realize that it is
necessary to put the surroundings in abeyance the better to see the
object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure,
because to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it, and because

THE BODY

objects form a system in which one cannot show itself without
concealing others. More precisely, the inner horizon of an object
cannot become an object without the surrounding objects’ becoming
a horizon, and so vision is an act with two facets. For I do not
identify the detailed object which I now have with that over which
my gaze ran a few minutes ago, by expressly comparing these details
with a memory of my first general view. When, in a film, the camera is
trained on an object and moves nearer to it to give a close-up view,
we can remember that we are being shown the ash tray or an actor’s
hand, we do not actually identify it. This is because the screen has no
horizons. In normal vision, on the other hand, I direct my gaze
upon a sector of the landscape, which comes to life and is disclosed,
while the other objects recede into the periphery and become
dormant, while, however, not ceasing to be there. Now with them I
have at my disposal their horizons, in which there is implied, as a
marginal view, the object on which my eyes at present fall. The
horizon, then, is what guarantees the identity of the object through¬
out the exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power
which my gaze retains over the objects which it has just surveyed,
and which it already has over the fresh details which it is about to
discover. No distinct memory and no explicit conjecture could fill
this r61e: they would give only a probable synthesis, whereas my
perception presents itself as actual. The object-horizon structure, or
the perspective, is no obstacle to me when I want to see the object:
for just as it is the means whereby objects are distinguished from each
other, it is also the means whereby they are disclosed. To see is to
enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would
not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other or behind
me. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from
this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they
present to it. But in so far as I see those things too, they remain
abodes open to my gaze, and, being potentially lodged in them, I
already perceive from various angles the central object of my present
vision. Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at
the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible
from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls, the
table can ‘see’; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it
‘shows’ to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as
objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the
others round it "as spectators of its hidden aspects which guarantee
the permanence of those aspects by their presence. Any seeing of an
object by me is instantaneously repeated between all those objects
in the world which are apprehended as co-existent, because each of
them is all that the others ‘see’ of it. Our previous formula must

EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE THOUGHT. PROBLEM OF THE BODY

therefore be modified; the house itself is not the house seen from
nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object
is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite
number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving
nothing hidden.

What we have just said about the spatial perspective could equally
be said about the temporal. If I contemplate the house attentively
and with no thought in my mind, it has something eternal about it,
and an atmosphere of torpor seems to be generated by it. It is true
that I see it from a certain point in my ‘duration’, but it is the same
house that I saw yesterday when it was a day younger; it is the same
house that either an old man or a child might behold. It is true, more¬
over, that age and change affect it, but even if it should collapse
tomorrow, it will remain for ever true that it existed today: each
moment of time calls all the others to witness; it shows by its advent
‘how things were meant to turn out’ and ‘how it will all finish’; each
present permanently underpins a point of time which calls for recog¬
nition from all the others, so that the object is seen at all times as it is
seen from all directions and by the same means, namely the structure
imposed by a horizon. The present still holds on to the immediate
past without positing it as an object, and since the immediate past
similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is wholly col¬
lected up and grasped in the present. The same is true of the immi¬
nent future which will also have its horizon of imminence. But with
my immediate past I have also the horizon of futurity which sur¬
rounded it, and thus I have my actual present seen as the future of that
past. With the imminent future, I have the horizon of past which
will surround it, and therefore my actual present as the past of that
future. Thus, through the double horizon of retention and proten-
tion, my present may cease to be a factual present quickly carried
away and abolished by the flow of duration, and become a fixed
and identifiable point in objective time.

But, once more, my human gaze never posits more than one facet of
the object, even though by means of horizons it is directed towards
all the others. It can never come up against previous appearances or
those presented to other people otherwise than through the inter¬
mediary of time and language. If I conceive in the image of my own
gaze those others which, converging from all directions, explore
every corner of the house and define it, I have still only a harmonious
and indefinite set of views of the object, but not the object in its
plenitude. In the same way, although my present draws into itself
time past and time to come, it possesses them only in intention, and
even if, for example, the consciousness of my past which I now have
seems to me to cover exactly the past as it was, the past which I claim

THE BODY

to recapture is not the real past, but my past as I now see it, perhaps
after altering it. Similarly in the future I may have a mistaken idea
about the present which I now experience. Thus the synthesis of
horizons is no more than a presumptive synthesis, operating with
certainty and precision only in the immediate vicinity of the object.
The remoter surrounding is no longer within my grasp; it is no
longer composed of still discernible objects or memories; it is an
anonymous horizon now incapable of bringing any precise testi¬
mony, and leaving the object as incomplete and open as it is indeed,
in perceptual experience. Through this opening, indeed, the sub¬
stantiality of the object slips away. If it is to reach perfect density, in
other words if there is to be an absolute object, it will have to con¬
sist of an infinite number of different perspectives compressed into a
strict co-existence, and to be presented as it were to a host of eyes all
engaged in one concerted act of seeing. The house has its water
pipes, its floor, perhaps its cracks which are insidiously spreading in
the thickness of its ceilings. We never see them, but it has them
along with its chimneys and windows which we can see. We shall
forget our present perception of the house : every time we are able to
compare our memories with the objects to which they refer, we are
surprised, even allowing for other sources of error, at the changes
which they owe to their own duration. But we still believe that there
is a truth about the past; we base our memory on the world's vast
Memory, in which the house has its place as it really was on that day,
and which guarantees its being at this moment. Taken in itself— and
as an object it demands to be taken thus — the object has nothing
cryptic about it; it is completely displayed and its parts co-exist while
our gaze runs from one to another, its present does not cancel its
past, nor will its future cancel its present. The positing of the object
therefore makes us go beyond the limits of our actual experience
which is brought up against and halted by an alien being, with the
result that finally experience believes that it extracts all its own
teaching from the object. It is this ek-stase* of experience which
causes all perception to be perception of something.

Obsessed with being, and forgetful of the perspectivism of my
experience, I henceforth treat it as an object and deduce it from a
relationship between objects. I regard my body, which is my point of
view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world. My recent
awareness of my gaze as a means of knowledge I now repress, and
treat my eyes as bits of matter. They then take their place in the same
objective space in which I am trying to situate the external object and

* Active transcendence of the subject in relation to the world. The author uses
either the French word extase , or Heidegger’s form ek-stase. The latter is the one
used throughout this translation (Translator’s note).

EXPERIENCE AND OBJECTIVE THOUGHT. PROBLEM OF THE BODY

I believe that I am producing the perceived perspective by the pro¬
jection of the objects on my retina. In the same way 1 treat my own
perceptual history as a result of my relationships with the objective
world; my present, which is my point of view on time, becomes one
moment of time among all the others, my duration a reflection or
abstract aspect of universal time, as my body is a mode of objective
space. In the same way, finally, if the objects which surround the
house or which are found in it remained what they arc in perceptual
experience, that is, acts of seeing conditioned by a certain perspec¬
tive, the house would not be posited as an autonomous being. Thus
the positing of one single object, in the full sense, demands the com¬
positive bringing into being of all these experiences in one act of
manifold creation. Therein it exceeds perceptual experience and the
synthesis of horizons — as the notion of a universe, that is to say, a
completed and explicit totality, in which the relationships are those
of reciprocal determination, exceeds that of a world, or an open and
indefinite multiplicity of relationships which are of reciprocal
implication.1 I detach myself from my experience and pass to the
idea. Like the object, the idea purports to be the same for everybody,
valid in all times and places, and the individuation of an object in an
objective point of time and space finally appears as the expression of
a universal positing power.2 1 am no longer concerned with my body,
nor with time, nor with the world, as I experience them in ante-
predicative knowledge, in the inner communion that I have with
them. I now refer to my body only as an idea, to the universe as idea,
to the idea of space and the idea of time. Thus ‘objective’ thought
(in Kierkegaard s sense) is formed — being that of common sense and
of science which finally causes us to lose contact with perceptual
experience, of which it is nevertheless the outcome and the natural
sequel. The whole life of consciousness is characterized by the
tendency to posit objects, since it is consciousness, that is to say self-
knowledge, only in so far as it takes hold of itself and draws itself
together in an identifiable object. And yet the absolute positing of a
single object is the death of consciousness, since it congeals the whole
of existence, as a crystal placed in a solution suddenly crystallizes it.

, cannot remain in this dilemma of having to fail to understand
either the subject or the object. We must discover the origin of the
object at the very centre of our experience; we must describe the
emergence of being and we must understand how, paradoxically,
there is for us an in-itself. In order not to prejudge the issue, we shall

1 Husserl, Umslurz der kopernikanischen Lehre: die Erde als Ur- Arche beweet
sich nicht (unpublished),

I understand by the sole power of judging, which resides in my mind, what
I thought I saw with my eyes.’ 2nd Meditation, AT, IX, p. 25.

THE BODY

take objective thought on its own terms and not ask it any questions
which it does not ask itself. If we are led to rediscover experience
behind it, this shift of ground will be attributable only to the diffi¬
culties which objective thought itself raises. Let us consider it then
at work in the constitution of our body as object, since this is a
crucial moment in the genesis of the objective world. It will be seen
that one’s own body evades, even within science itself, the treatment
to which it is intended to subject it. And since the genesis of the
objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the
body, by withdrawing from the objective worid, will carry with it the
intentional threads linking it to its surrounding and finally reveal to
us the perceiving subject as the perceived world.

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND
MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

THE definition of the object is, as we have seen, that it exists partes
extra partes , and that consequently it acknowledges between its
parts, or between itself and other objects only external and mech¬
anical relationships, whether in the narrow sense of motion received
and transmitted, or in the wider sense of the relation of function to
variable. Where it was desired to insert the organism in the universe
of objects and close that universe through it, it was necessary to
translate the functioning of the body into the language of the in-
use}) and discover, beneath behaviour, the linear dependence of
stimulus and receptor, receptor and Emp finder} It was of course
realized that in the circuit of behaviour new particular forms
emerge, and the theory of specific nervous energy, for example,
certainly endowed the organism with the power of transforming the
physical world. But in fact it attributed to the nervous systems the
occult power of creating the different structures of our experience,
and whereas sight, touch and hearing are so many ways of gaining
access to the object, these structures found themselves transformed
into compact qualities derived from the local distinction between the
organs used. Thus the relationship between stimulus and perception
could remain clear and objective, and the psycho-physical event was
of the same kind as the causal relations obtaining ‘in the world’.
Modern physiology no longer has recourse to these pretences. It no
longer links the different qualities of one and the same sense, and
the data of different senses, to distinct material instruments. In
reality injuries to centres and even to conductors are not translated
into the loss of certain qualities of sensation or of certain sensory
data, but into loss of differentiation in the function. We have already
discussed this: wherever the seat of the injury in the sensory routes
1 Cf. La Structure du Comportement, Chap. I and II.

THB BODY

and whatever its origin, one observes, for example, a decay of
sensitivity to colour; at the beginning, all colours are affected, their
basic shade remaining the same, but their saturation decreasing;
then the spectrum is simplified and reduced to four colours : yellow,
green, blue, crimson, and indeed all short-wave colours tend to¬
wards a kind of blue, all tong-wave colours towards a kind of yellow,
vision being liable, moreover, to vary from moment to moment,
according to degree of fatigue. Finally a monochrome stage in grey
is reached, although favourable conditions (contrast, long exposure)
may momentarily bring back dichromic sight.1 The progress of the
lesion in the nervous tissue does not, therefore, destroy, one after
another, ready-made sensory contents, but makes the active differ¬
entiation of stimuli, which appears to be the essential function of the
nervous system, increasingly unreliable. In the same way, in the case
of non-cortical injury to the sense of touch, if certain contents
(temperatures) are more easily destroyed and are the first to dis¬
appear, this is not because a determinate region, lost to the patient,
enables us to feel heat and cold, since the specific sensation will be
restored if a sufficiently extensive stimulus is applied;* it is rather
that the sensation succeeds in taking its typical form only under a
more energetic stimulus. Central lesions seem to leave qualities in¬
tact; on the other hand they modify the spatial organization of data
and the perception of objects. This is what had led Lu the belief in
specialized gnosic centres for the localization and interpretation of
qualities. In fact, modern research shows that central lesions have
the effect in most cases of raising the chronaxies, which are increased
to two or three times their normal strength in the patient. The
excitation produces its effects more slowly, these survive longer, and
the tactile perception of roughness, for example, is jeopardized in so
far as it presupposes a succession of circumscribed impressions or a
precise consciousness of the different positions of the hand.3 The
vague localization of the stimulus is not explained by the destruction
of a localizing centre, but by the reduction to a uniform level of
sensations, which are no longer capable of organizing themselves
into a stable grouping in which each of them receives a univoca!
value and is translated into consciousness only by a limited change.1
Thus the excitations of one and the same sense differ less by reason
of the material instrument which they use than in the way in wiiich
the elementary stimuli arc spontaneously organized among them¬
selves, and this organization is the crucial factor both at the level of
sensible ‘qualities* and at that of perception. It is this, and not the
specific energy of the nervous apparatus examined, which causes an

1 J. Stein, Pathologie der Wahmehmung, p. 365.

» Ibid., p. 358. 3 Ibid., pp. 360-1. * Ibid., p. 362.

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

excitant to give rise to a tactile or thermic sensation. If a given area of
skin is several times stimulated with a hair, the first perceptions are
clearly distinguished and localized each time at the same point As
the stimulus is repeated, the localization becomes less precise, per*
ception widens in space, while at the same time the sensation ceases
to be specific: it is no longer a contact, but a feeling of burning, at
one moment cold and at the next hot Later stilt the patient thinks
the stimulus is moving and describing a circle on his skin. Finally
nothing more is felt.1 It follows that the ‘sensible quality', the spatial
limits set to the percept, and even the presence or absence of a per¬
ception, are not de facto effects of the situation outside the organism,
but represent the way in which it meets stimulation and is related to
it An excitation is not perceived when it strikes a sensory organ
which is not ‘attuned' to it.2 The function of the organism in receiving
stimuli is, so to speak, to ‘conceive’ a certain form of excitation.3
The ‘psychophysical event1 is therefore no longer of the type of
‘worldly’ causality, the brain becomes the seat of a process of ‘pattern-
ing’ which intervenes even before the cortical stage, and which,
from the moment the nervous system comes into play, confuses the
relations of stimulus to organism. The excitation is seized and
reorganized by transversal functions which make it resemble the
perception which it is about to arouse. I cannot envisage this form
which is traced out in the nervous system, this exhibiting of a struc¬
ture, as a set of processes in the third person, as the transmission of
movement or as die determination of one variable by another. I
cannot acquire detached knowledge of it. In so far as I guess what
it may be, it is by abandoning the body as an object, partes extra
partes , and by going back to the body which I experience at this
moment, in the manner, for example, in which my hand moves
round the object it touches, anticipating the stimuli and itself trac¬
ing out the form which I am about to perceive. I cannot under¬
stand the function of the living body except by enacting it my¬
self, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the
world.

Thus extcroceptivity demands that stimuli be given a shape; the
consciousness of the body invades the body, the soul spreads over
all its parts, and behaviour overspills its central sector. But one
might reply that this ‘bodily experience’ is itself a ‘representation’, a
‘psychic fact’, and that as such it is at the end of a chain of physical

1 J. Stein, Pathologie der Wahrnehmung , p. 364.

8 Die Rcizvorgangetrefifen ein ungestimmtes Reaktionsorgan. Stein, Pathologie
der Wahrnehnnmg, p. 361.

3 ‘Die Sinne ... die Form eben durch urspriingl iches Formbegreifen zu
erkennen geben.’ Ibid., p. 353.

THH BODY

and physiological events which alone can be ascribed to the ‘real
body’. Is not my body, exactly as are external bodies, an object
which acts on receptors and finally gives rise to the consciousness of
the body? Is there not an ‘interoceptivity’ just as there is an ‘extero-
ceptivity’? Cannot I find in the body message wires sent by the
internal organs to the brain, which are installed by nature to provide
the soul with the opportunity of feeling its body? The consciousness
of the body, and the soul, are thus repressed. The body becomes the
highly polished machine which the ambiguous notion of behaviour
nearly made us forget. For example, if, in the case of a man who has
lost a leg, a stimulus is applied, instead of to the leg, to the path from
the stump to the brain, the subject will feel a phantom leg, because
the soul is immediately linked to the brain and to it alone.

What has modern physiology to say about this ? Anaesthesia with
cocaine does not do away with the phantom limb, and there are
cases of phantom limbs without amputation as a result of brain
injury.1 Finally the imaginary limb is often found to retain the
position in which the real arm was at the moment of injury: a man
wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters
that lacerated his real one.2 Is it then necessary to abandon the
‘peripheral theory’ in favour of a ‘central theory’? But a central
theory would get us no further if it added no more to the peripheral
conditions of the imaginary limb than cerebral symptoms. For a
collection of cerebral symptoms could not represent the relation¬
ships in consciousness which enter into the phenomenon. It depends
indeed on ‘psychic’ determinants. An emotion or circumstance,
which recalls those in which the wound was received, creates a
phantom limb in subjects who had none.3 It happens that the
imaginary arm is enormous after the operation, but that it subse¬
quently shrinks and is absorbed into the stump ‘as the patient con¬
sents to accept his mutilation’.4 The phenomenon of the phantom
limb is here elucidated by that of anosognosia,* which clearly de¬
mands a psychological explanation. Subjects who systematically
ignore their paralysed right hand, and hold out their left hand when
asked for their right, refer to their paralysed arm as ‘a long, cold
snake’, which rules out any hypothesis of real anaesthesia and sug-

1 Lhermitte, Vintage de noire Corps , p. 47.

2 Ibid., pp. 129 and ff.

3 Ibid., p. 57.

4 Ibid., p. 73. J. Lhermitte points out that the illusion of the limbless bears a
relationship to the patient’s psychological make-up : it is more frequent among
educated people.

* Failure or refusal on the patient’s part to recognize the existence of a disease
or disability (Translator’s note).

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

gests one in terms of the refusal to recognize their deficiency.1 Must
we then conclude that the phantom limb is a memory, a volition or
a belief, and, failing any physiological explanation, must we provide
a psychological explanation for it? But no psychological explanation
can overlook the fact that the severance of the nerves to the brain
abolishes the phantom limb.2

What has to be understood, then, is how the psychic determining
factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is
not clear how the imaginary limb, if dependent on physiological
conditions and therefore the result of a third person causality, can
in another context arise out of the personal history of the patient,
his memories, emotions and volitions. For in order that the two sets
of conditions might together bring about the phenomenon, as two
components bring about a resultant, they would need an identical
point of application or a common ground, and it is difficult to see
what ground could be common to ‘physiological facts’ which are in
space and ‘psychic facts’ which are nowhere: or even to objective
processes like nervous influxes which belong to the realm of the in*
itself, and cogitationes such as acceptance and refusal, awareness of
the past, and emotion, which are of the order of the for-itseff A
hybrid theory of the phantom limb which found a place for both sets
of conditions5 may, then, be valid as a statement of the known facts;
but it is fundamentally obscure. The phantom limb is not the mere
outcome of objective causality; no more is it a cogitatio . It could be a
mixture of the two only if we could find a means of linking the
‘psychic’ and the ‘physiological’, the ‘for-itself’ and the ‘in-itself’, to
each other to form an articulate whole, and to contrive some meet¬
ing-point for them: if the third person processes and the personal
acts could be integrated into a common middle term.

In order to describe the belief in the phantom limb and the un¬
willingness to accept mutilation, writers speak of a ‘driving into the
unconscious’ or ‘an organic repression’.4 These un-Cartesian terms
force us to form the idea of an organic thought through which the
relation of the ‘psychic’ to the ‘physiological’ becomes conceivable.
We have already met elsewhere, in the case of substitutions, pheno¬
mena which lie outside the alternatives of psychic and physiological,
of final and mechanistic causes.5 When the insect, in the performance

1 Lhermitte, V Image de notre Corps , pp. 129 and ff.

2 Ibid., pp. 129 and ff.

3 The phantom limb lends itself neither to a purely physiological explanation,
nor to a purely psychological one. Such is the conclusion of J. Lhermitte, V Image
de notre Corps , p. 126.

4 Schilder, Das K6rperschema\ Menmnger-Lerchcnthal, Das Truggebilde der
eigenen Gestalt, p. 174; Lhermitte, IS Image de notre Corps, p, 143.

6 Cf. La Structure du Comport ement, pp. 47 and ff.

THE BODY

of an instinctive act, substitutes a sound leg for one cut off, it is not,
as we saw, that a stand-by device, set up in advance, is automatically
put into operation and substituted for the circuit which is out of
action. But neither is it the case that the creature is aware of an aim
to be achieved, using its limbs as various means, for in that case the
substitution ought to occur every time the act is prevented, and we
know that it does not occur if the leg is merely tied. The insect
simply continues to belong to the same world and moves in it with
all its powers. The tied limb is not replaced by the free one, because it
continues to count in the insect’s scheme of things, and because the
current of activity which flows towards the world still passes through
it. There is in this instance no more choice than in the case of a drop
of oil which uses all its strength to solve in practical terms the
maximum and minimum problem which confronts it. The difference
is simply that the drop of oil adapts itself to given external forces,
while the insect itself projects the norms of its environment and itself
lays down the terms of its vital problem;1 but here it is a question of
an a priori of the species and not a personal choice. Thus what is
found behind the phenomenon of substitution is the impulse of being
in the world, and it is now time to put this notion into more precise
terms. When we say that an animal exists , that it has a world, or that
it belongs to a world, we do not mean that it has a perception or
objective consciousness of that world. The situation which unleashes
instinctive operations is not entirely articulate and determinate, its
total meaning is not possessed, as is adequately shown by the mis¬
takes and the blindness of instinct. It presents only a practical signifi¬
cance; it asks for only bodily recognition; it is experienced as an
‘open’ situation, and ‘requires’ the animal’s movements, just as the
first notes of a melody require a certain kind of resolution, without
its being known in itself, and it is precisely what allows the limbs to
be substituted for each other, and to be of equal value before the
self-evident demands of the task. In so far as it anchors the subject
to a certain ‘environment’, is ‘being-in-the-world’ something like
‘attention to life’ in Bergson or ‘the function of the real’ in P. Janet?
Attention to life is the awareness we experience of ‘nascent move¬
ments’ in our bodies. Now reflex movements, whether adumbrated
or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and
results consciousness can observe, but in which it is not involved.2

1 Cf. La Structure du Comportement , pp. 196 and ff.

1 When Bergson stresses the unity of perception and action and invents, for its
expression, the term ‘sensory-motor process’, he is clearly seeking to involve con¬
sciousness in the world. But if feeling is representing a quality to oneself, and if
movement is changing one’s position in the objective world, then between sensa¬
tion and movement, even taken in their nascent state, no compromise is possible,
and they are distinct from each other as are the for-itself and the in-itself. Gener-

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

In fact the reflexes themselves arc never blind processes: they adjust
themselves to a ‘direction’ of the situation, and express our orienta¬
tion towards a ‘behavioural setting’ just as much as the action of the
‘geographical setting’ upon us. They trace out from a distance the
structure of the object without waiting for its point by point stimula¬
tion, It is this global presence of the situation which gives a meaning
to the partial stimuli and causes them to acquire importance, value or
existence for the organism. The reflex does not arise from objective
stimuli, but moves back towards them, and invests them with a mean¬
ing which they do not possess taken singly as psychological agents,
but only when taken as a situation. It causes them to exist as a situa¬
tion, it stands in a ‘cognitive’ relation to them, which means that it
shows them up as that which it is destined to confront. The reflex,
in so far as it opens itself to the meaning of a situation, and percep¬
tion; in so far as it does not first of all posit an object of knowledge
and is an intention of our whole being, are modalities of a pre¬
objective view which is what we call being-m-the-world. Prior to
stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner
diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our
reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area
of our possible operations, the scope of our life. Some subjects can

ally speaking, Bergson saw that the body and the mind communicate with each
other through the medium of time, that to be a mind is to stand above time’s flow
and that to have a body is to have a present. The body, he says, is an instantaneous
section made in the becoming of consciousness (Mature at Mimoire% p. 150). But
the body remains for him what we have called the objective body ; consciousness
remains knowledge; time remains a successive ‘now’, whether it ‘snowballs upon
itself’ or is spread in spatialized time. Bergson can therefore only compress or
expand the series of ‘present moments’; he never reaches the unique movement
whereby the three dimensions of time are constituted, and one cannot see why
duration is squeezed into a present, or why consciousness becomes involved in a
body and a world.

As for the ‘function of the real’, P. Janet uses it as an existential notion. This is
what enables him to sketch out a profound theory of emotion as the collapse of
our customary being, and a flight from our world. (Cf. for example the interpre¬
tation of the fit of hysterics, De VAngoisse a VExtase , T. II, p. 450 and ff.) But this
theory of emotion is not followed out and, as J. P. Sartre shows, it conflicts, in
the writings of P. Janet, with a mechanistic conception rather close to that of
James: the collapse of our existence into emotion is treated as a mere derivation
from psychological forces, and the emotion itself as the consciousness of this pro¬
cess expressed in the third person, so that there is no longer reason to look for a
meaning in the emotional behaviour which is the result of the blind momentum
of the tendencies, and we return to dualism. (Cf. J. P. Sartre, Esquisse d'u/ie theorie
de r Emotion.) P. Janet, moreover, treats psychological tension — that is, the move¬
ment whereby we spread our ‘world’ before us— expressly as a representative
hypothesis; so he is far from considering it in general terms as the concrete
essence of man, though he does so implicitly in particular analyses.

THE BODY

come near to blindness without changing their ‘world’: they can be
seen colliding with objects everywhere, but they are not aware of no
longer being open to visual qualities, and the structure of their con¬
duct remains unmodified. Other patients, on the other hand, lose
their world as soon as its contents are removed; they abandon their
habitual way of life even before it has become impossible, making
themselves into premature invalids and breaking their vital contact
with the world before losing sensory contact with it. There is, then,
a certain consistency in our ‘world’, relatively independent of
stimuli, which refuses to allow us to treat being-in-the-world as a
collection of reflexes — a certain energy in the pulsation of existence,
relatively independent of our voluntary thoughts, which prevents
us from treating it as an act of consciousness. It is because it is a
preobjective view that being-in-the-world can be distinguished
from every third person process, from every modality of the res
extensa , as from every cogitatio, from every first person form of
knowledge — and that it can effect the union of the ‘psychic’ and the
‘physiological’.

Let us return now to the problem with which we began. Anosog-
nosia and the phantom limb lend themselves neither to a physio¬
logical nor to a psychological explanation, nor yet to a mixture of the
two, though they can be related to the two sets of conditions. A
physiological explanation would account for anosognosia and the
phantom limb as the straightforward suppression or equally straight¬
forward persistence of ‘interoceptive’ stimulations. According to this
hypothesis, anosognosia is the absence of a fragment of representa¬
tion which ought to be given, since the corresponding limb is there;
the phantom limb is the presence of part of the representation of the
body which should not be given, since the corresponding limb is not
there. If one now gives a psychological account of the phenomena,
the phantom limb becomes a memory, a positive judgement or a
perception, while anosognosia becomes a bit of forgetfulness, a
negative judgement or a failure to perceive. In the first case the
phantom limb is the actual presence of a representation, anosognosia
the actual absence of a representation. In the second case the phan¬
tom limb is the representation of an actual presence, whereas
anosognosia is the representation of an actual absence. In both
cases we are imprisoned in the categories of the objective world, in
which there is no middle term between presence and absence. In
reality the anosognosic is not simply ignorant of the existence of his
paralysed limb: he can evade his deficiency only because he knows
where he risks encountering it, just as the subject, in psychoanalysis,
knows what he does not want to face, otherwise he would not be
able to avoid it so successfully. We do not understand the absence or

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

death of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from
him and when we realize that we shall never again receive one; so at
first we avoid asking in order not to have to notice this silence; we
turn aside from those areas of our life in which we might meet this
nothingness, but this very fact necessitates that we intuit them. In
the same way the anosognosic leaves his paralysed arm out of
account in order not to have to feel his handicap, but this means that
he has a preconscious knowledge of it. It is true that in the case of the
phantom limb the subject appears to be unaware of the mutilation
and relies on his imaginary limb as he would on a real one, since he
tries to walk with his phantom leg and is not discouraged even by a
fall. But he can describe quite well, in spite of this, the peculiarities of
the phantom leg, for example its curious motility, and if he treats it
in practice as a real limb, this is because, like the normal subject, he
has no need, when he wants to set off walking, of a clear and articu¬
late perception of his body: it is enough for him to have it ‘at his
disposal’ as an undivided power, and to sense the phantom limb as
vaguely involved in it. The consciousness of the phantom limb re¬
mains, then, itself unclear. The man with one leg feels the missing
limb in the same way as I feel keenly the existence of a friend who is,
nevertheless, not before my eyes ; he has not lost it because he con¬
tinues to allow for it, just as Proust can recognize the death of his
grandmother, yet without losing her, as long as he can keep her on
the horizon of his life. The phantom arm is not a representation of
the arm, but the ambivalent presence of an arm. The refusal of
mutilation in the case of the phantom limb, or the refusal of disable¬
ment in anosognosia are not deliberate decisions, and do not take
place at the level of positing consciousness which takes up its position
explicitly after considering various possibilities. The will to have a
sound body or the rejection of an infirm one are not formulated
for themselves; and the awareness of the amputated arm as
present or of the disabled arm as absent is not of the kind: ‘I think
that . . .’

This phenomenon, distorted equally by physiological and psycho¬
logical explanations, is, however, understood in the perspective of
bcing-in-the-world. What it is in us which refuses mutilation and
disablement is an / committed to a certain physical and inter-human
world, who continues to tend towards his world despite handicaps
and amputations and who, to this extent, does not recognize them de
jure. The refusal of the deficiency is only the obverse of our in¬
herence in a world, the implicit negation of what runs counter to the
natural momentum which throws us into our tasks, our cares, our
situation, our familiar horizons. To have a phantom arm is to remain
open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable; it is to

THE BODY

retain the practical field which one enjoyed before mutilation. The
body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body Is, for a
living creature, to be intcrvolved in a definite environment, to identify
oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.
In the self-evidence of this complete world in which manipulatable
objects still figure, in the force of their movement which still flows
towards him, and in which is still present the project of writing or
playing the piano, the cripple still finds the guarantee of his whole¬
ness. But in concealing his deficiency from him, the world cannot fail
simultaneously to reveal it to him: for if it is true that I am conscious
of my body via the world, that it is the unperceived term in the
centre of the world towards which all objects turn their face, it is
true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of the world: I
know that objects have several facets because I could make a tour of
inspection of them, and in that sense I am conscious of the world
through the medium of my body. It is precisely when my customary
world arouses in me habitual intentions that I can no longer, if I
have lost a limb, be effectively drawn into it, and the utilizable
objects, precisely in so far as they present themselves as utilizable,
appeal to a hand which 1 no longer have. Thus are delimited, in the
totality of my body, regions of silence. The patient therefore realizes
his disability precisely in so far as he is ignorant of it, and is ignorant
of it precisely to the extent that he knows of it. This paradox is that
of all being in the world: when I move towards a world I bury my
perceptual and practical intentions in objects ; which ultimately
appear prior to and external to those intentions, and which never¬
theless exist for me only in so far as they arouse in me thoughts or
volitions. In the case under consideration, the ambiguity of know¬
ledge amounts to this: our body comprises as it were two distinct
layers, that of the customary body and that of the body at this
moment. In the first appear manipulatory movements which have
disappeared from the second, and the problem how I can have the
sensation of still possessing a limb which I no longer have amounts
to finding out how the habitual body can act as guarantee for the
body at this moment. How can I perceive objects as manipulatable
when I can no longer manipulate them? The manipulatable must
have ceased to be what I am now manipulating, and become what
one can manipulate; it must have ceased to be a thing manipulatable
for me and become a thing manipulatable in itself Correspond¬
ingly, my body must be apprehended not only in an experience
which is instantaneous, peculiar to itself and complete in itself,
but also in some general aspect and in the light of an impersonal
being.

In that way the phenomenon of the phantom limb is absorbed into

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

that of repression, which we shall find throwing some light on it.
For repression, to which psycho-analysis refers, consists in the
subject’s entering upon a certain course of action — a love affair, a
career, a piece of work — in his encountering on this course some
barrier, and, since he has the strength neither to surmount the
obstacle nor to abandon the enterprise, he remains imprisoned in the
attempt and uses up his strength indefinitely renewing it in spirit.
Time in its passage does not carry away with it these impossible
projects; it does not close up on traumatic experience; the subject
remains open to the same impossible future, if not in his explicit
thoughts, at any rate in his actual being. One present among all
presents thus acquires an exceptional value; it displaces the others
and deprives them of their value as authentic presents. We continue
to be the person who once entered on this adolescent affair, or the
one who once lived in this parental universe. New perceptions, new
emotions even, replace the old ones, but this process of renewal
touches only the content of our experience and not its structure.
Impersonal time continues its course, but personal time is arrested.
Of course this fixation does not merge into memory; it even excludes
memory in so far as the latter spreads out in front of us, like a
picture, a former experience, whereas this past which remains our
true present does not leave us but remains constantly hidden behind
our gaze instead of being displayed before it. The traumatic ex¬
perience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective
consciousness and as a ‘dated’ moment; it is of its essence to survive
only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.
I forgo my constant power of providing myself with ‘worlds’ in the
interest of one of them, and for that very reason this privileged world
loses its substance and eventually becomes no more than a certain
dread . All repression is, then, the transition from first person
existence to a sort of abstraction of that existence, which lives on a
former experience, or rather on the memory of having had the
memory, and so on, until finally only the essential form remains.
Now as an advent of the impersonal, repression is a universal
phenomenon, revealing our condition as incarnate beings by relating
it to the temporal structure of being in the world. To the extent that
I have ‘sense organs’, a ‘body’, and ‘psychic functions’ comparable
with other men’s, each of the moments of my experience ceases to be
an integrated and strictly unique totality, in which details exist only
in virtue of the whole; I become the meeting point of a host of
‘causalities’. In so far as I inhabit a ‘physical world’, in which con¬
sistent ‘stimuli’ and typical situations recur — and not merely the
historical world in which situations are never exactly comparable —
my life is made up of rhythms which have not their reason in what I

THE BODY

have chosen to be, but their condition in the humdrum setting which
is mine. Thus there appears round our personal existence a margin of
almost impersonal existence, which can be practically taken for
granted, and which I rely on to keep me alive; round the human
world which each of us has made for himself is a world in general
terms to which one must first of all belong in order to be able to enclose
oneself in the particular context of a love or an ambition. Just as we
speak of repression in the limited sense when I retain through time
one of the momentary worlds through which I have lived, and make
it the formative element of my whole life — so it can be said that my
organism, as a prepersonal cleaving to the general form of the world,
as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath my personal
life, the part of an inborn complex . It is not some kind of inert thing;
it too has something of the momentum of existence. It may even
happen when I am in danger that my human situation abolishes my
biological one, that my body lends itself without reserve to action.1
But these moments can be no more than moments,2 and for most of
the time personal existence represses the organism without being
able either to go beyond it or to renounce itself; without, in other
words, being able either to reduce the organism to its existential
self, or itself to the organism. While I am overcome by some grief
and wholly given over to my distress, my eyes already stray in front

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and thereupon resume their autonomous existence. Following upon
that minute into which we wanted to compress our whole life, time, or
at least, prepersonal time, begins once more to flow, carrying away,
if not our resolution, at least the heartfelt emotions which sustained
it. Personal existence is intermittent and when this tide turns and
recedes, decision can henceforth endow my life with only an arti¬
ficially induced significance. The fusion of soul and body in the act,
the sublimation of biological into personal existence, and of the
natural into the cultural world is made both possible and precarious
by the temporal structure of our experience. Every present grasps,
by stages, through its horizon of immediate past and near future,
the totality of possible time; thus does it overcome the dispersal of
instants, and manage to endow our past itself with its definitive mean-

1 Thus Saint-Exup6ry, above Arras, with shells bursting all round him, can
no longer feel as a thing distinct from him his body which shortly before
seemed to escape him : ‘It is as if my life were given to me every second, as if my
life became every moment more keenly felt. I live. I am alive. I am still alive.
I am always alive. I am now nothing but a source of life.’ Pilote de Guerre ,
p. 174.

2 ‘But it is true that, in the course of my life, when not in the grip of urgency,
when my meaning is not at stake, I can see no more serious problems than those
raised by my body.’ A. de Saint-Exupery, Pilote de Guerre, p. 169.

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

ing, re-integrating into personal existence even that past of all pasts
which the stereotyped patterns of our organic behaviour seem to
suggest as being at the origin of our volitional being. In this context
even reflexes have a meaning, and each individual’s style is still
visible in them, just as the beating of the heart is felt as far away as
the body’s periphery. But this power naturally belongs to all presents,
the old no less than the new. Even if we claim to have a better
understanding of our past than it had of itself, it can always reject
our present judgement and shut itself up in its own autonomous self¬
evidence. It necessarily does so in so far as I conceive it as a former
present. Each present may claim to solidify our life, and indeed that
is what distinguishes it as the present. In so far as it presents itself
as the totality of being and fills an instant of consciousness, we never
extricate ourselves completely from it, time never completely closes
over it and it remains like a wound through which our strength ebbs
away. It can now be said that, a fortiori , the specific past, which our
body is, can be recaptured and taken up by an individual life only
because that life has never transcended it, but secretly nourishes it,
devoting thereto part of its strength, because its present is still that
past. This can be seen in cases of illness in which bodily events be¬
come the events of the day. What enables us to centre our existence
is also what prevents us from centring it completely, and the
anonymity of our body is inseparably both freedom and servitude.
Thus, to sum up, the ambiguity of being in the world is translated
by that of the body, and this is understood through that of time.

We shall return later to the question of time. Let it merely be noted
for the moment that starting with this central phenomenon the
relationships between the ‘psychic’ and the ‘physiological’ become
conceivable. Why can the memories recalled to the one-armed man
cause the phantom arm to appear? The phantom arm is not a
recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now, folded
over his chest, with no hint of its belonging to the past. Nor can we
suppose that the image of an arm, wandering through conscious¬
ness, has joined itself to the stump: for then it would not be a
‘phantom’, but a renascent perception. The phantom arm must be
that same arm, lacerated by shell splinters, its visible substance
burned or rotted somewhere, which appears to haunt the present
body without being absorbed into it. The imaginary arm is, then, like
repressed experience, a former present which cannot decide to
recede into the past. The memories called up before the patient in¬
duce in him a phantom limb, not as an image in associationism
summons up another image, but because any memory reopens time
lost to us and invites us to recapture the situation evoked. Intel¬
lectual memory, in Proust’s sense, limits itself to a description of the

THE BODY

past, a past as idea, from which it extracts ‘characteristics’ or com¬
municable meaning rather than discovering a structure. But it would
not be memory if the object which it constructs were not still held by
a few intentional threads to the horizon of the lived-through past,
and to that past itself as we should rediscover it if we were to delve
beyond these horizons and reopen time. In the same way, if we put
back emotion into being in the world, we can understand how it can
be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved
in a situation which one is not managing to face and from which,
nevertheless, one does not want to escape. Rather than admit
failure or retrace one’s steps, the subject, caught in this existential
dilemma, breaks in pieces the objective world which stands in his
way and seeks symbolical satisfaction in magic acts.1 The ruin of the
objective world, abandonment of true action, flight into a self-
contained realm are conditions favouring the illusion of those who
have lost a limb in that it too presupposes the erasure of reality. In so
far as memory and emotion can call up the phantom limb, this is not
comparable to the action of one cogitatio which necessitates another
cogitatio, or that of one condition bringing about its consequence.
It is not that an ideal causality here superimposes itself on a physio¬
logical one, it is that an existential attitude motivates another and
that memory, emotion and phantom limb are equivalents in the
context of being in the world.

Now why does the severing of the afferent nerves banish the
pTiantom limb ? In the perspective of being in the world this fact
means that the impulses arriving from the stump keep the amputated
limb in the circuit of existence. They establish and maintain its place,
prevent it from being abolished, and cause it still to count in the
organism. They keep empty an area which the subject’s history fills,
they enable the latter to build up the phantom, as structural dis¬
turbances allow the content of psychosis to form into delirium.
From our point of view, a sensori-motor circuit is, within our com¬
prehensive being in the world, a relatively autonomous current of
existence. Not that it always brings to our total being a separable
contribution, but because under certain circumstances it is possible
to bring to light constant responses to stimuli which are themselves
constant. The question is, therefore, how the refusal of the deficiency,
which is a total attitude of our existence, needs for its expression
such a highly specialized modality as a sensori-motor circuit, and
why our being in the world, which provides all our reflexes with
their meaning, and which is thus their basis, nevertheless delivers
itself over to them and is finally based upon them. Indeed, as we
have shown elsewhere, sensori-motor circuits are all the more
1 Cf. J. P. Sartre, Esquisse (Tune theorie de /’ emotion .

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

clearly marked as one is concerned with more integrated existences,
and the reflex in its pure state is to be found only in man, who has not
only a setting ( Umwelt ), but also a world (Welt).1

From the existential point of view, these two facts, which scientific
induction contents itself with setting side by side, are linked internally
and are understood in the light of one and the same idea. If man is
not to be embedded in the matrix of that syncretic setting in which
animals lead their lives in a sort of ek-stase, if he is to be aware of a
world as the common reason for all settings and the theatre of all
patterns of behaviour, then between himself and what elicits his
action a distance must be set, and, as Malebranche put it, forms of
stimulation from outside must henceforth impinge on him ‘respect¬
fully’; each momentary situation must cease to be, for him, the
totality of- being, each particular response must no longer fill his
whole field of action. Furthermore, the elaboration of these re¬
sponses, instead of occurring at the centre of his existence, must take
place on the periphery and finally the responses themselves must no
longer demand that on each occasion some special position be taken
up, but they must be outlined once and for all in their generality.
Thus it is by giving up part of his spontaneity, by becoming involved
in the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits that
man can acquire the mental and practical space which will theoretic¬
ally free him from his environment and allow him to see it. And
provided that even the realization of an objective world is set in the
realm of existence, we shall no longer find any contradiction between
it and bodily conditioning : it is an inner necessity for the most inte¬
grated existence to provide itself with an habitual body. What allows
us to link to each other the ‘physiological’ and the ‘psychic’, is the
fact that, when reintegrated into existence, they are no longer dis¬
tinguishable respectively as the order of the in-itself, and that of the
for-itself \ and that they are both directed towards an intentional
pole or towards a world. Probably the two histories never quite
coincide : one is commonplace and cyclic, the other may be open and
unusual, and it would be necessary to keep the term ‘history’ for the
second order of phenomena if history were a succession of events
which not only have a meaning, but furnish themselves with it.
However, failing a true revolution which breaks up historical
categories so far valid, the figure in history does not create his part
completely: faced with typical situations he takes typical decisions
and Nicholas II, repeating the very words of Louis XVI, plays the
already written part of established power in face of a new power.
His decisions translate the a priori of a threatened prince as our
reflexes translate a specific a priori . These stereotypes, moreover, are
1 La Structure du Comportement, p. 55.

THE BODY

not a destiny, and just as clothing, jewellery and love transfigure the
biological needs from which they arise, in the same way within the
cultural world the historical a priori is constant only for a given
phase and provided that the balance of forces allows the same forms
to remain. So history is neither a perpetual novelty, nor a perpetual
repetition, but the unique movement which creates stable forms and
breaks them up. The organism and its monotonous dialectical pro¬
cesses are therefore not alien to history and as it were inassimilable
to it. Man taken as a concrete being is not a psyche joined to an
organism, but the movement to and fro of existence which at one
time allows itself to take corporeal form and at others moves towards
personal acts. Psychological motives and bodily occasions may over¬
lap because there is not a single impulse in a living body which is
entirely fortuitous in relation to psychic intentions, not a single
mental act which has not found at least its germ or its general outline
in physiological tendencies. It is never a question of the incompre¬
hensible meeting of two causalities, nor of a collision between the
order of causes and that of ends. But by an imperceptible twist an
organic process issues into human behaviour, an instinctive act
changes direction and becomes a sentiment, or conversely a human
act becomes torpid and is continued absent-mindedly in the form of
a reflex. Between the psychic and the physiological there may take
place exchanges which almost always stand in the way of defining a
mental disturbance as psychic or somatic. The disturbance described
as somatic produces, on the theme of the organic accident, tentative
psychic commentaries, and the ‘psychic’ trouble confines itself to
elaborating the human significance of the bodily event. A patient
feels a second person implanted in his body. He is a man in half his
body, a woman in the other half. How are we to distinguish in this
symptom the physiological causes and psychological motives ? How
are we to associate the two explanations and how imagine any point
at which the two determinants meet? ‘In symptoms of this kind, the
psychic and the physical are so intimately linked that it is unthink¬
able to try to complete one of these functional domains by the other,
and that both must be subsumed under a third . . . (We must) . . .
move on from knowledge of psychological and physiological facts to
a recognition of the animic event as a vital process inherent in our
existence’.1 Thus, to the question which we were asking, modern
physiology gives a very clear reply: the psycho-physical event can
no longer be conceived after the model of Cartesian physiology and
as the juxtaposition of a process in itself and a cogitatio. The union of
soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external

1 E. Menninger-Lerchenthal, Das Truggebilde der eigenen Gestalt, pp.
174-5.

THE BODY AS OBJECT AND MECHANISTIC PHYSIOLOGY

terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is
enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. We found
existence in the body when we approached it by the first way of
access, namely through physiology. We may therefore at this stage
examine this first result and make it more explicit, by questioning
existence this time on its own nature, which means, by having
recourse to psychology.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE
BODY AND CLASSICAL
PSYCHOLOGY

IN its descriptions of the body from the point of view of the self,
classical psychology was already wont to attribute to it ‘characteris¬
tics’ incompatible with the status of an object. In the first place it was
stated that my body is distinguishable from the table or the lamp in
that I can turn away from the latter whereas my body is constantly
perceived. It is therefore an object which does not leave me. But in
that case is it still an object? If the object is an invariable structure, it
is not one in spite of the changes of perspective, but in that change or
through it. It is not the case that ever-renewed perspectives simply
provide it with opportunities of displaying its permanence, and with
contingent ways of presenting itself to us. It is an object, which means
that it is standing in front of us, only because it is observable : situ¬
ated, that is to say, directly under our hand or gaze, indivisibly over¬
thrown and re-integrated with every movement they make. Otherwise
it would be true like an idea and not present like a thing. It is par¬
ticularly true that an object is an object only in so far as it can be
moved away from me, and ultimately disappear from my field of
vision. Its presence is such that it entails a possible absence. Now the
permanence of my own body is entirely different in kind: it is not at
the extremity of some indefinite exploration; it defies exploration and
is always presented to me from the same angle. Its permanence is not
a permanence in the world, but a permanence from my point of view.
To say that it is always near me, always there for me, is to say that it
is never really in front of me, that I cannot array it before my eyes,
that it remains marginal to all my perceptions, that it is with me. It is
true that external objects too never turn one of their sides to me with¬
out hiding the rest, but I can at least freely choose the side which they

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY

are to present to me. They could not appear otherwise than in per¬
spective, but the particular perspective which I acquire at each
moment is the outcome of no more than physical necessity, that is to
say, of a necessity which I can use and which is not a prison for me:
from my window only the tower of the church is visible, but this
limitation simultaneously holds out the promise that from elsewhere
the whole church could be seen. It is true, moreover, that if I am a
prisoner the church will be restricted, for me, to a truncated steeple.
If I did not take off my clothes I could never see the inside of them,
and it will in fact be seen that my clothes may become appendages of
my body. But this fact does riot prove that the presence of my body is
to be compared to the de facto permanence of certain objects, or the
organ compared to a tool which is always available. It shows that
conversely those actions in which I habitually engage incorporate
their instruments into themselves and make them play a part in the
original structure of my own body. As for the latter, it is my basic
habit, the one which conditions all the others, and by means of which
they are mutually comprehensible. Its permanence near to me, its
unvarying perspective are not a de facto necessity, since such necessity
presupposes them: in order that my window may impose upon me a
point of view of the church, it is necessary in the first place that my
body should impose upon me one of the world; and the first necessity
tan be merely physical only in virtue of the fact that the second is
metaphysical; in short, I am accessible to factual situations only if my
nature is such that there are factual situations for me. In other words,
I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine
them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not
observe : in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second
body which itself would be unobservable. When I say that my body is
always perceived by me, these words are not to be taken in a purely
statistical sense, for there must be, in the way my own body presents
itself, something which makes its absence or its variation inconceiv¬
able. What can it be? My head is presented to my sight only to the
extent of my nose end and the boundaries of my eye-sockets. I can
see my eyes in three mirrors, but they are the eyes of someone observ¬
ing, and I have the utmost difficulty in catching my living glance when
a mirror in the street unexpectedly reflects my image back at me. My
body in the mirror never stops following my intentions like their
shadow, and if observation consists in varying the point of view while
keeping the object fixed, then it escapes observation and is given to
me as a simulacrum of my tactile body since it imitates the body’s
actions instead of responding to them by a free unfolding of perspec¬
tives. My visual body is certainly an object as far as its parts far re¬
moved from my head are concerned, but as we come nearer to the

THE BODY

eyes, it becomes divorced from objects, and reserves among them a
quasi-space to which they have no access, and when I try to fill this
void by recourse to the image in the mirror, it refers me back to an
original of the body which is not out there among things, but in my
own province, on this side of all things seen. It is no different, in
spite of what may appear to be the case, with my tactile body, for if
I can, with my left hand, feel my right hand as it touches an object,
the right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches : the
first is a system of bones, muscles and flesh brought down at a point
of space, the second shoots through space like a rocket to reveal the
external object in its place. In so far as it sees or touches the world, my
body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its
ever being an object, ever being ‘completely constituted’1 is that it is
that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so
far as it is that which sees and touches. The body therefore is not the
nondescript one among external objects and simply having the pecu¬
liarity of always being there. If it is permanent, the permanence is
absolute and is the ground for the relative permanence of disappear¬
ing objects, real objects. The presence and absence of external objects
are only variations within a field of primordial presence, a perceptual
domain over which my body exercises power. Not only is the perma¬
nence of my body not a particular case of the permanence of external
objects in the world, but the second cannot be understood except
through the first : not only is the perspective of my body not a particu¬
lar case of that of objects, but furthermore the presentation of objects
in perspective cannot be understood except through the resistance of
my body to all variation of perspective. If objects may never show me
more than one of their facets, this is because I am myself in a certain
place from which I see them and which I cannot see. If nevertheless I
believe in the existence of their hidden sides and equally in a world
which embraces them all and co-exists with them, I do so in so far as
my body, always present for me, and yet involved with them in so
many objective relationships, sustains their co-existence with it and
communicates to them all the pulse of its duration. Thus the per¬
manence of one’s own body, if only classical psychology had analysed
it, might have led it to the body no longer conceived as an object of
the world, but as our means of communication with it, to the world
no longer conceived as a collection of determinate objects, but as the
horizon latent in all our experience and itself ever-present and an¬
terior to every determining thought.

1 Husserl, IdeenT . II (unpublished). We are indebted to Mgr Noel and the Insti-
tut Superieur de Philosophic of Louvain, trustees of the collected Nachlass , and
particularly to the kindness of the Reverend Father Van Br6da, for having been
able to consult a certain amount of unpublished material.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY

The other ‘characteristics' whereby one’s own body were defined
were no less interesting, and for the same reasons. My body, it was
said, is recognized by its power to give me ‘double sensations’ : when
I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, as an object, has
the strange property of being able to feel too. We have just seen that
the two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched
and touching to each other. When I press my two hands together, it
is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two
objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both
hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched’. What
was meant by talking about ‘double sensations’ is that, in passing
from one role to the other, I can identify the hand touched as the
same one which will in a moment be touching. In other words, in this
bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left,
I can anticipate for an instant the integument or incarnation of that
other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in
order to explore them. The body catches itself from the outside en¬
gaged in a cognitive process; it tries to touch itself while being
touched, and initiates ‘a kind of reflection’1 which is sufficient to dis¬
tinguish it from objects, of which I can indeed say that they ‘touch’
my body, but only when it is inert, and therefore without ever catch¬
ing it unawares in its exploratory function.

It was also said that the body is an affective object, whereas exter¬
nal things are from my point of view merely represented. This
amounted to stating a third time the problem of the status of my own
body. For if I say that my foot hurts, I do not simply mean that it is
a cause of pain in the same way as the nail which is cutting into it,
differing only in being nearer to me; I do not mean that it is the last
of the objects in the external world, after which a more intimate kind
of pain should begin, an unlocalized awareness of pain in itself, re¬
lated to the foot only by some causal connection and within the
closed system of experience. I mean that the pain reveals itself as
localized, that it is constitutive of a ‘pain-infested space’. ‘My foot
hurts’ means not: ‘I think that my foot is the cause of this pain’, but:
‘the pain comes from my foot’ or again ‘my foot has a pain’. This is
shown clearly by the ‘primitive voluminousness of pain’ formerly
spoken of by psychologists. It was therefore recognized that my body
does not present itself as the objects of external impressions do, and
that perhaps even these latter objects do no more than stand out
against the affective background which in the first place throws con¬
sciousness outside itself.

Finally when the psychologists tried to confine ‘kinaesthetic

1 Husserl, Meditations cartesiennes, p. 81.

THE BODY

sensations’ to one’s own body, arguing that these sensations present
the body’s movements to us globally, whereas they attributed the
movements of external objects to a mediating perception and to a
comparison between successive positions, it could have been objected
that movement, expressing a relationship, cannot be felt, but de¬
mands a mental operation. This objection, however, would merely
have been an indictment of their language. What they were express¬
ing, badly it is true, by ‘kinaesthetic sensation’, was the originality of
the movements which I perform with my body: they directly antici¬
pate the final situation, for my intention initiates a movement
through space merely to attain the objective initially given at the
starting point; there is as it were a germ of movement which only
secondarily develops into an objective movement. I move external
objects with the aid of my body, which takes hold of them in one
place and shifts them to another. But my body itself I move directly,
I do not find it at one point of objective space and transfer it to an¬
other, I have no need to look for it, it is already with me — I do not
need to lead it towards the movement’s completion, it is in contact
with it from the start and propels itself towards that end. The rela¬
tionships between my decision and my body are, in movement, magic
ones.

If the description of my own body given by classical psychology
already offered all that is necessary to distinguish it from objects, how
does it come about that psychologists have not made this distinction
or that they have in any case seen no philosophical consequence flow¬
ing from it? The reason is that, taking a step natural to them, they
chose the position of impersonal thought to which science has been
committed as long as it believed in the possibility of separating, in ob¬
servation, on the one hand what belongs to the situation of the ob¬
server and on the other the properties of the absolute object. For the
living subject his own body might well be different from all external
objects; the fact remains that for the unsituated thought of the
psychologist the experience of the living subject became itself an
object and, far from requiring a fresh definition of being, took its
place in universal being. It was the life of the ‘psyche’ which stood in
opposition to the real, but which was treated as a second reality, as
an object of scientific investigation to be brought under a set of laws.
It was postulated that our experience, already besieged by physics and
biology, was destined to be completely absorbed into objective know¬
ledge, with the consummation of the system of the sciences. Thence¬
forth the experience of the body degenerated into a ‘representation’
of the body; it was not a phenomenon but a fact of the psyche. In the
matter of living appearance, my visual body includes a large gap at
the level of the head, but biology was there ready to fill that gap, to

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY

explain it through the structure of the eyes, to instruct me in what the
body really is, showing that I have a retina and a brain like other men
and like the corpses which I dissect, and that, in short, the surgeon’s
instrument could infallibly bring to light in this indeterminate zone
of my head the exact replica of plates illustrating the human anatomy.
I apprehend my body as a subject-object, as capable of ‘seeing’ and
‘suffering’, but these confused representations were so many psycho¬
logical oddities, samples of a magical variety of thought the laws of
which are studied by psychology and sociology and which has its
place assigned to it by them, in the system of the real world, as an
object of scientific investigation. This imperfect picture of my body,
its marginal presentation, and its equivocal status as touching and
touched, could not therefore be structural characteristics of the body
itself; they did not affect the idea of it; they became ‘distinctive
characteristics’ of those contents of consciousness which make up our
representation of the body: these contents are consistent, affective
and strangely duplicated in ‘double sensations’, but apart from this
the representation of the body is a representation like any other and
correspondingly the body is an object like any other. Psychologists
did not realize that in treating the experience of the body in this way
they were simply, in accordance with the scientific approach, shelving
a problem which ultimately could not be burked. The inadequacy of
my perception was taken as a de facto inadequacy resulting from the
organization of my sensory apparatus; the presence of my body was
taken as a de facto presence springing from its constant action on my
receptive nervous system; finally the union of soul and body, which
was presupposed by these two explanations, was understood, in
Cartesian fashion, as a de facto union whose de jure possibility need
not be established, because the fact, as the starting point of know¬
ledge, was eliminated from the final result. Now the psychologist
could imitate the scientist and, for a moment at least, see his body as
others saw it, and conversely see the bodies of others as mechanical
things with no inner life. The contribution made from the experiences
of others had the effect of dimming the structure of his own, and
conversely, having lost contact with himself he became blind to the
behaviour of others. He thus saw everything from the point of view
of universal thought which abolished equally his experience of others
and his experience of himself. But as a psychologist he was engaged
in a task which by nature pulled him back into himself, and he could
not allow himself to remain unaware to this extent. For whereas
neither the physicist nor the chemist are the objects of their own in¬
vestigation, the psychologist was himself in the nature of the case,
the fact which exercised him. This representation of the body, this
magical experience, which he approached in a detached frame of

THE BODY

mind, was himself; he lived it as he thought it. It is true that, as has
been shown,1 it was not enough for him to be a psyche in order to
know this, for this knowledge, like other knowledge, is acquired
only through our relations with other people. It does not emerge
from any recourse to an ideal of introspective psychology, and be¬
tween himself and others no less than between himself and himself,
the psychologist was able and obliged to rediscover a pre-objective
relationship. But as a psyche speaking of the psyche, he was all that
he was talking about. This history of the psyche which he was ela¬
borating in adopting the objective attitude was one whose outcome
he already possessed within himself, or rather he was, in his existence,
its contracted outcome and latent memory. The union of soul and
body had not been brought about once and for all in a remote realm;
it came into being afresh at every moment beneath the psychologist’s
thinking, not as a repetitive event which each time takes the psyche
by surprise, but as a necessity that the psychologist knew to be in the
depths of his being as lie became aware of it as a piece of knowledge.
The birth of perception from the * sense-data’ to the "world’ was sup¬
posed to be renewed with each act of perception, otherwise the sense-
data would have lost the meaning they owed to this development.
Hence the ‘psyche’ was not an object like others: it had done every¬
thing that one was about to say of it before it could be said; the psy¬
chologist’s being knew more about itself than he did; nothing that
had happened or was happening according to science was completely
alien to it. Applied to the psyche, the notion of fact, therefore, un¬
derwent a transformation. The de facto psyche, with its ‘peculiarities’,
was no longer an event in objective time and in the external world,
but an event with which we were in internal contact, of which we were
ourselves the ceaseless accomplishment or upsurge, and which con¬
tinually gathered within itself its past, its body and its world. Before
being an objective fact, the union of soul and body had to be, then,
a possibility of consciousness itself and the question arose as to what
the perceiving subject is and whether he must be able to experience a
body as his own. There was no longer a fact passively submitted to,
but one assumed. To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience
is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other
people, to be with them instead of being beside them. To concern
oneself with psychology is necessarily to encounter, beneath objective
thought which moves among ready-made things, a first opening upon
things without which there would be no objective knowledge. The
psychologist could not fail to rediscover himself as experience, which
means as an immediate presence to the past, to the world, to the body

1 P. Guillaume, VObjectivite en Psychologic.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY

and to others at the very moment when he was trying to see
himself as an object among objects. Let us then return to the
‘characteristics’ of one’s own body and resume the study of it
where we left off. By doing so we shall trace the progress of
modem psychology and thereby contrive along with it the return to
experience.

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S
OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

LET us first of all describe the spatiality of my own body. If my arm
is resting on the table I should never think of saying that it is beside
the ash-tray in the way in which the ash-tray is beside the telephone.
The outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations
do not cross. This is because its parts are inter-related in a peculiar
way: they are not spread out side by side, but enveloped in each
other. For example, my hand is not a collection of points. In cases of
allochciria,* in which the subject feels in his right hand stimuli ap¬
plied to his left hand, it is impossible to suppose that each of the
stimulations changes its spatial value on its own account.* 1 The vari¬
ous points on the left hand are transferred to the right as relevant to a
total organ, a hand without parts which has been suddenly displaced.
Hence they form a system and the space of my hand is not a mosaic
of spatial values. Similarly my whole body for me is not an assemblage
of organs juxtaposed in space. I am in undivided possession of it and

I know where each of my limbs is through a body image in which all
are included. But the notion of body image is ambiguous, as are all
notions which make their appearance at turning points in scientific
advance. They can be fully developed only through a reform of
methods. At first, therefore, they are used only in a sense which falls
short of their full sense, and it is their immanent development which
bursts the bounds of methods hitherto used. ‘Body image’ was at
first understood to mean a compendium of our bodily experience,
capable of giving a commentary and meaning to the internal impres-

* A disorder of sensation in which sensations arc referred to the wrong part
of the body (Translator’s note). Cf. for example Head, On disturbances of sensation
with especial reference to the pain of visceral disease.

1 Ibid. We have discussed the notion of the local signal in La Structure du Com-
portement, pp. 102 and ff.

THE SPATJALITY OF ONE*S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

sions and the impression of possessing a body at any moment. It was
supposed to register for me the positional changes of the parts of my
body for each movement of one of them, the position of each local
stimulus in the body as a whole* an account of the movements per¬
formed at every instant during a complex gesture, in short a continual
translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular im¬
pressions of the moment. When the term body image was first used,
it was thought that nothing more was being introduced than a con¬
venient name for a great many associations of images, and it was
intended merely to convey the fact that these associations were firmly
established and constantly ready to come into play. The body image
was supposed gradually to show itself through childhood in propor¬
tion as the tactile, kinaesthetic and articular contents were associated
among themselves or with visual contents, and more easily evoked
them.1 Its physiological representation could then be no more than a
focus of images in the classical sense. Yet in the use made of it by
psychologists, it is clear that the body image does not fit into this
associationist definition. For example, in order that the body image
may elucidate allocheiria, it is not enough that each sensation of the
left hand should take its place among generic images of all parts of
the body acting in association to form around it, as it were, a super¬
imposed outline of the body; these associations must be constantly
subject to a single law, the spatiality of the body must work down¬
wards from the whole to the parts, the left hand and its position must
be implied in a comprehensive bodily purpose and it must originate in
that purpose, so that it may at one stroke not only be superimposed or
brought down on to the right hand, but actually become the right
hand. When we try2 to elucidate the phenomenon of the phantom
limb by relating it to the body image of the subject, we add to the
accepted explanations, in terms of cerebral tracks and recurrent
sensations, only if the body image, instead of being the residue of
habitual cenesthesis, becomes the law of its constitution. If a need
was felt to introduce this new word, it was in order to make it clear
that the spatial and temporal unity, the inter-sensory or the sensori¬
motor unity of the body is, so to speak, de jure , that it is not confined
to contents actually and fortuitously associated in the course of our
experience, that it is in some way anterior to them and makes their
association possible. We are therefore feeling our way towards a
second definition of the body image: it is no longer seen as the

1 Cf. for example Head, Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesion, p. 189;
Pick, Sturungen der Orient ienmg am eigenen Korper, and even Schilder, Das
Korperschema, although Schilder admits that ‘such a complex is not the sum of
ils parts but a new whole in relation to them*.

2 As for example Lhermitte, U Image de notre Corps .

THE DODY

straightforward result of associations established during experience,
but a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory- world, a
‘form’ in the sense used by Gestalt psychology.1 But already this
second definition too is superseded by the analyses of the psycho¬
logists. It is inadequate to say that my body is a form, that is to say
a phenomenon in which the totality takes precedence over the parts.
How is such a phenomenon possible? Because a form, comparable to
the mosaic of a physico-chemical body or to that of ‘cenesthesis’, is
a new type of existence. The fact that the paralysed limb of the
anosognosic no longer counts in the subject’s body image, is ac¬
counted for by the body image’s being neither the mere copy nor even
the global awareness of the existing parts of the body, and by its
active integration of these latter only in proportion to their value to
the organism’s projects. Psychologists often say that the body image
is dynamic .2 Brought down to a precise sense, this term means that
my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain
existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of
external objects or like that of ‘spatial sensations’, a spatiality of
position , but a spatiality of situation . If I stand in front of my desk and
lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole
of my body trails behind them like the tail of a comet. It is not that I
am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulders or back, but these
are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole
posture can be read so to speak in the pressure they exert on the table.
If I stand holding my pipe in my closed hand, the position of my hand
is not determined discursively by the angle which it makes with my
forearm, and my forearm with my upper arm, and my upper arm with
my trunk, and my trunk with the ground. I know indubitably where
my pipe is, and thereby I know where my hand and my body are, as
primitive man in the desert is always able to take his bearings im¬
mediately without having to cast his mind back, and add up distances
covered and deviations made since setting off. The word ‘here’ ap¬
plied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation
to other positions or to external co-ordinates, but the laying down of
the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object,
the situation of the body in face of its tasks. Bodily space can be dis¬
tinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of
spreading them out, because it is the darkness needed in the theatre
to show up the performance, the background of somnolence or re-

1 Konrad, Das Kdrper schema , eine kritische Studie and der Versuch einer Revision,
pp, 365 and 367. Biirger-Prinz and Kaila define the body image as ‘knowledge of
one’s own body as the collective expression both of the mutual relations of its
limbs and of its parts’. Ibid., p. 365.

2 Cf. for example Konrad, op. cit.

100

THE SPATIAHTY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

serve of vague power against which the gesture and its aim1 stand
out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures and
points can come to light. In the last analysis, if my body can be a
‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against in¬
different backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by
its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of
itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body image is finally a way of
stating that my body is in the world.8 As far as spatiality is concerned,
and this alone interests us at the moment, one’s own body is the third
term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure,
and every figure stands out against the double horizon of externa!
and bodily space. One must therefore reject as an abstraction any
analysis of bodily space which takes account only of figures and
points, since these can neither be conceived nor be without horizons.

It will perhaps be replied that the figure-background structure or
the point-horizon structure themselves presuppose the notion of ob¬
jective space; that in order to experience a display of dexterity as a
figure against the massive background of the body, the hand and the
rest of the body must be finked by this relationship of objective spa¬
tiality, so that the figure-background structure becomes once again
one of the contingent contents of the universal form of space. But
what meaning could the word ‘against’ have for a subject not placed
by his body face to face with the world? It implies the distinction of
a top and a bottom, or an ‘orientated space’.3 When I say that an ob¬
ject is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or
in the object, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits
the relationship of my body to external objects. Stripped of this
anthropological association, the word on is indistinguishable from
the word ‘under’ or the word ‘beside’. Even if the universal form of
space is that without which there would be for us no bodily space, it
is not that by which there is one. Even if the form is not the setting in
which, but the means whereby the content is posited, it is not the suffi¬
cient means of this act of positing as far as bodily space is concerned,
and to this extent the bodily content remains, in relation to it, some¬
thing opaque, fortuitous and unintelligible. The only solution along
this road would be to recognize that the body’s spatiality has no
meaning of its own to distinguish it from objective spatiality which
would do away with the content as a phenomenon and hence with
the problem of its relation to form. But can we pretend to discover
1 Grlhibaum. Asphasie imd Motorik> p. 395.

f We have already seen {cf, supra pp. 8!-2) that the phantom limb, which is
a modality of the body image, is understood in terms of the general movement
of being in the world,

3 Cf. Becker, Beit rpge zuv phanotnenologischen Begviindung dev Geonietvie und
ihrer physikaUschen Anwendungen.

101

THE BODY

no distinctive meaning in the words ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘beside’, or in the
dimensions of orientated space? Even if analysis discovers in all these
relationships the universal relation of externality, the self-evidence of
top and bottom, right and left, for the person who has his being in
space, prevents us from treating all these distinctions as nonsense,
and suggest to us that we should look beneath the explicit meaning of
definitions for the latent meaning of experiences. The relationships
between the two spaces would therefore be as follows: as soon as I
try to posit bodily space or bring out its meaning 1 find nothing in it
but intelligible space. But at the same time this intelligible space is
not extracted from orientated space, it is merely its explicit expression,
and, when separated from that root has no meaning whatsoever. The
truth is that homogeneous space can convey the meaning of orient¬
ated space only because it is from the latter that it has received that
meaning. In so far as the content can be really subsumed under the
form and can appear as the content of that form, it is because the
form is accessible only through the content. Bodily space can really
become a fragment of objective space only if within its individuality
as bodily space it contains the dialectical ferment to transform it into
universal space. This is what we have tried to express by saying that
the point-horizon structure is the foundation of space. The horizon
or background would not extend beyond the figures or round about
it, unless they partook of the same kind of being as it, and unless they
could be converted into points by a transference of the gaze. But the
point-horizon structure can teach me what a point is only in virtue of
the maintenance of a hither zone of corporeality from which to be
seen, and round about it indeterminate horizons which are the coun¬
terpart of this spectacle. The multiplicity of points or ‘heres’ can in
the nature of things be constituted only by a chain of experiences in
which on each occasion one and no more of them is presented as an
object, and which is itself built up in the heart of this space. And
finally, far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of
space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body.

If bodily space and external space form a practical system, the
first being the background against which the object as the goal of our
action may stand out or the void in front of which it may come to
light, it is clearly in action that the spatiality of our body is brought
into being, and an analysis of one’s own movement should enable us
to arrive at a better understanding of it. By considering the body in
movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover,
time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to
space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their
basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of
established situations. We should like to analyse closely an example of

102

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

morbid motility which clearly shows the fundamental relations be¬
tween the body and space.

A patient1 whom traditional psychiatry would class among cases
of psychic blindness is unable to perform ‘abstract’ movements with
his eyes shut; movements, that is, which are not relevant to any actual
situation, such as moving arms and legs to order, or bending and
straightening a finger. Nor can he describe the position of his body
or even his head, or the passive movements of his limbs. Finally,
when his head, arm or leg is touched, he cannot identify the point on
his body; he cannot distinguish two points of contact on his skin even
as much as three inches apart; and he cannot recognize the size or
shape of objects placed against his body. He manages the abstract
movements only if he is allowed to watch the limb required to per¬
form them, or to go through preparatory movements involving the
whole body. The localization of stimuli, and recognition of objects
by touch also become possible with the aid of the preparatory move¬
ments. Even when his eyes are closed, the patient performs with
extraordinary speed and precision the movements needed in living
his life, provided that he is in the habit of performing them: he takes
his handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose, takes a match
out of a box and lights a lamp. He is employed in the manufacture of
wallets and his production rate is equal to three quarters of that of a
normal workman. He can even2 without any preparatory movement,
perform these ‘concrete’ movements to order. In the same patient, and
also in cerebellar cases, one notices 3 a dissociation of the act of point¬
ing from reactions of taking or grasping : the same subject who is un¬
able to point to order to a part of his body, quickly moves his hand
to the point where a mosquito is stinging him. Concrete movements
and acts of grasping therefore enjoy a privileged position for which
we need to find some explanation.

Let us examine the question more closely. A patient, asked to
point to some part of his body, his nose for example, can only manage
to do so if he is allowed to take hold of it. If the patient is set the
task of interrupting the movement before its completion, or if he is
allowed to touch his nose only with a wooden ruler, the action be¬
comes impossible.4 It must therefore be concluded that ‘grasping’ or
‘touching’, even for the body, is different from ‘pointing’. From the

1 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber den Einfluss des vollstandigen Verlustes des optischen
Vorst ellungsvermogens auf das taktile Erkennen. — Psychohgische Anatysm hint-
pathobgischer Fdlle , Chap. If pp. 157-250.

2 Goldstein, Vber die Abhdngigkeit der Bewegimgen von optischen Vorgfmgeth
This second work makes use of observations made on the same patient, Schneider,
two years after those collected in the work just referred to.

3 Goldstein, Zeigen und Greifen , pp. 453-66.

4 Ibid. This is a cerebellar case.

103

THE BODY

outset the grasping movement is magically at its completion ; it can
begin only by anticipating its end, since to disallow taking hold is
sufficient to inhibit the action. And it has to be admitted that a point
on my body can be present to me as one to be taken hold of without
being given in this anticipated grasp as a point to be indicated. But
how is this possible? If I know where my nose is when it is a question
of holding it, how can I not know where it is when it is a matter of
pointing to it? It is probably because knowledge of where something
is can be understood in a number of ways. Traditional psychology
has no concept to cover these varieties of consciousness of place
because consciousness of place is always, for such psychology, a
positional consciousness, a representation, Vor-stellung, because as
such it gives us the place as a determination of the objective world
and because such a representation either is or is not, but, if it is,
yields the object to us quite unambiguously and as an end identifiable
through all its appearances. Now here, on the other hand, we have to
create the concepts necessary to convey the fact that bodily space may
be given to me in an intention to take hold without being given in an
intention to know. The patient is conscious of his bodily space as the
matrix of his habitual action, but not as an objective setting; his body
is at his disposal as a means of ingress into a familiar surrounding,
but not as the means of expression of a gratuitous and free spatial
thought. When ordered to perform a concrete movement, he first of
all repeats the order in a questioning tone of voice, then his body
assumes the general position required for the task; finally he goes
through the movement. It is noticeable that the whole body is in-
volved in it, and that the patient never cuts it down, as a normal sub¬
ject would, to the strict minimum. To the military salute are added
the other external marks of respect. To the right hand pantomime of
combing the hair is added, with the left, that of holding a mirror;
when the right hand pretends to knock in a nail, the left pretends to
hold the nail. The explanation is that the order is taken quite seri¬
ously and that the patient manages to perform these concrete move¬
ments to order only provided that he places himself mentally in the
actual situation to which they correspond. The normal subject, on
giving, to order, a military salute, sees in it no more than an ex¬
perimental situation, and therefore restricts the movement to its most
important elements and does not throw himself into it.1 He is using
his body as a means to play acting; he finds it entertaining to pretend
to be a soldier; he escapes from reality in the role of the soldier2 just
as the actor slips his real body into the ‘great phantom’3 of the

1 Goldstein, Uber die Abhcmgigkeit , p. 175.

2 J. P. Sartre, U Imaginaire , p. 243.

3 Diderot, Paradoxe sur le Comedien.

104

THE SPATIALITY OF ONI^S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

character to be played. The normal man and the actor do not mistake
imaginary situations for reality, but extricate their real bodies from
the living situation to make them breathe, speak and, if need be, weep
in the realm of imagination. This is what our patient is no longer able
to do. In the course of living, he says ‘I experience the movements as
being a result of the situation, of the sequence of events themselves;
myself and my movements are, so to speak, merely a link in the whole
process and I am scarcely aware of any voluntary initiative ... It all
happens independently of me.’ In the same way, in order to make a
movement to order he places himself ‘in the affective situation as a
whole, and it is from this that the movement flows, as in real life’.1 If
his performance is interrupted and he has the experimental situation
recalled to him, all his dexterity disappears. Once more kinetic initia¬
tive becomes impossible, the patient must first of all ‘find’ his arm,
‘find’, by the preparatory movements, the gesture called for, and the
gesture itself loses the melodic character which it presents in ordinary
life, and becomes manifestly a collection of partial movements strung
laboriously together. I can therefore take my place, through the
medium of my body as the potential source of a certain number of
familiar actions, in my environment conceived as a set of maniptdcmda
and without, moreover, envisaging my body or my surrounding as
objects in the Kantian sense, that is, as systems of qualities linked by
some intelligible law, as transparent entities, free from any attach¬
ment to a specific place or time, and ready to be named or at least
pointed out. There is my arm seen as sustaining familiar acts, my
body as giving rise to determinate action having a field or scope
known to me in advance, there are my surroundings as a collection
of possible points upon which this bodily action may operate, — and
there is, furthermore, my arm as a mechanism of muscles and bones,
as a contrivance for bending and stretching, as an articulated object,
the world as a pure spectacle into which I am not absorbed, but
which I contemplate and point out. As far as bodily space is con¬
cerned, it is clear that there is a knowledge of place which is reducible
to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply
nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed in the form of a descrip¬
tion or even pointed out without a word being spoken. A patient of
the kind discussed above, when stung by a mosquito, does not need
to look for the place where he has been stung. He finds it straight
away, because for him there is no question of locating it in relation to
axes of co-ordinates in objective space, but of reaching with his
phenomenal hand a certain painful spot on his phenomenal body,
and because between the hand as a scratching potentiality and the
place stung as a spot to be scratched a directly experienced relationship
1 Goldstein, Ober die Abhilttgigkeit, pp. 175-6.

105

THE BODY

is presented in the natural system of one’s own body. The whole
operation takes place in the domain of the phenomenal; it docs not
run through the objective world, and only the spectator, who lends
his objective representation of the living body to the acting subject,
can believe that the sting is perceived, that the hand moves in objec¬
tive space, and consequently find it odd that the same subject should
fail in experiments requiring him to point tilings out. Similarly the
subject, when put in front of his scissors, needle and familiar tasks,
does not need to look for his hands or his fingers, because they are
not objects to be discovered in objective space: bones, muscles and
nerves, but potentialities already mobilized by tbe perception of scis¬
sors or needle, the central end of those ‘intentional threads’ which
link him to the objects given. It is never our objective body that we
move, but our phenomenal body, and there is no mystery in that,
since our body, as the potentiality of this or that part of the world,
surges towards objects to be grasped and perceives them.1 In the
same way the patient has no need to look for a theatre of action and
a space in which to deploy these concrete movements: the space is
given to him in the form of the world at this moment; it is the piece
of leather ‘to be cut up’; it is the lining ‘to be sewn’. The bench, scis¬
sors, pieces of leather offer themselves to the subject as poles of
action; through their combined values they delimit a certain situa¬
tion, an open situation moreover, which calls for a certain mode of
resolution, a certain kind of work. The body is no more than an
clement in the system of the subject and his world, and the task to be
performed elicits the necessary movements from him by a sort of
remote attraction, as the phenomenal forces at work in my visual
field elicit from me, without any calculation on my part, the motor
reactions which establish the most effective balance between them, or
as the conventions of our social group, or our set of listeners, im¬
mediately elicit from us the words, attitudes and tone which are fit¬
ting. Not that we are trying to conceal our thoughts or to please
others, but because we are literally what others think of us and what
our world is. In the concrete movement the patient has a positing
awareness neither of the stimulus nor of his reaction : quite simply he
is his body and his body is the potentiality of a certain world.

1 It is not a question of how the soul acts on the objective body, since it is not
on the latter that it acts, but on the phenomenal body. So the question has to be
reframed, and we must ask why there are two views of me and of my body : my
body for me and my body for others, and how these two systems can exist to¬
gether. It is indeed not enough to say that die objective body belongs to the realm
of ‘for others’, and my phenomenal body to that of ‘for me’, and we cannot refuse
to pose the problem of their relations, since the ‘for me’ and the ‘for others’ co¬
exist in one and the same world, as is proved by my perception of an other who
immediately brings me back to the condition of an object for him.

106

THE SPATIAL1TY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

What, on the other hand, happens in experiments in which the
patient fails ? If a part of his body is touched and he is asked to locate
the point of contact, he first of all sets his whole body in motion and
thus narrows down the problem of location, then he comes still
nearer by moving the limb in question, and the process is completed
in the form of quiverings of the skin in the neighbourhood of the
point touched.1 If the subject’s arm is extended horizontally, he cao-
not describe its position until he has performed a set of pendular
movements which convey to him the arm position in relation to the
trunk, that of the forearm to the rest of the arm, and that of the trunk
in relation to the vertical. In the case of passive movement, the subject
feels that there is movement but cannot say of what kind and in what
direction. Here again he resorts to active movements. The patient
concludes that he is lying down from the pressure of the mattress on
his back, or that he is standing from the pressure of the ground on his
feet.2 If the two points of a compass are placed on his hand, he can
distinguish them only if he is allowed to rotate his hand, and bring
first one and then the other point into contact with his skin. If letters
or figures are traced out on his hand, he identifies them only provided
that he can himself move his hand, and it is not the movement of the
point on his hand which he perceives, but conversely the movement
of his hand in relation to the point. This is proved by tracing on his
left hand normal letters, which are never recognized, then the mir¬
rored image of the same letters, which is immediately understood.
The mere touching of a paper rectangle or oval gives rise to no
recognition, whereas the subject recognizes the figures if he is allowed
to make exploratory movements to ‘spell out’ the shapes, to spot
their ‘characteristics’ and to identify the object on this basis.3 How
are we to co-ordinate this set of facts and how are we to discover by
means of it what function, found in the normal person, is absent in
the patient ? There can be no question of simply transferring from the
normal person what the deficient one lacks and is trying to recover.
Illness, like childhood and ‘primitive’ mentality, is a complete form
of existence and the procedures which it employs to replace normal
functions which have been destroyed are equally pathological pheno¬
mena. It is impossible to deduce the normal from the pathological,
deficiencies from substitute functions, through merely changing the
sign. We must take substitutions as substitutions, as allusions to some

1 Goldstein, Vber den Einfhtss . . ., pp. 167-206.

2 Ibid., pp. 206-13.

3 For example, the subject runs his fingers over an angle several times : ‘My
fingers/ he says, ‘move straight along, then stop, and then move off again in
another direction; it is an angle, it must be a right angle.’ — ‘Two, three, four
angles, the sides are each two centimetres long, so they are equal, all the angles
are right angles . . . It’s a dice.’ Ibid., p. 195. Cf. pp. 187-206.

I 107

THE BODY

fundamental function that they are striving to make good, and the
direct image of which they fail to- furnish. The genuine inductive
method is not a ‘differential method’; it consists in correctly reading
phenomena, in grasping their meaning, that is, in treating them as
modalities and variations of the subject’s total being. We observe
that when the patient is questioned about the position of his limbs or
of a tactile stimulus, he tries, by means of preparatory movements, to
make his body into an object of present perception. Asked about the
shape of an object in contact with his body, he tries to trace it out
himself by following the outline of the object. Nothing would be more
misleading than to suppose the normal person adopting similar
procedures, differing merely in being shortened by constant use. The
, kind of patient under consideration sets out in search of these explicit
perceptions only in order to provide a substitute for a certain mutual
presence of body and object which is a datum of normal experience
and which we still have to reconstitute. It is true that even in the nor¬
mal person the perception of the body and of objects in contact with
the body is vague when thefe is no movement.1 The fact remains that
the normal person can, in the absence of any movements, always dis¬
tinguish a stimulus applied to his head from one applied to his body.
Are we to suppose that2 excitations felt as coming either from outside
or from one’s own body have brought into play, in that person,
‘kinaesthetic residua’ which take the place of actual movements ? But
then how could data supplied by the sense of touch arouse ‘kin-
aesthetic residua’ of a determinate kind unless they carried within
themselves some characteristic which enables them to do so, unless
they themselves, in other words, had some well defined or obscure
spatial significance?3 At least we can say that the normal subject can
immediately ‘come to grips’ with his body.4 He enjoys the use of his
body not only in so far as it is involved in a concrete setting, he is in
a situation not only in relation to the tasks imposed by a particular
job, he is not open merely to real situations; for, over and above all
this, his body is correlated with pure stimuli devoid of any practical
bearing; he is open to those verbal and imaginary situations which he
can choose for himself or which may be suggested to him in the
course of an experiment. His body, when touched, is not presented to
him as a geometrical figure in which each stimulus occupies an exr
plicit position, and Schneider’s disease lies precisely in his need, in
order to find out where he is being touched, to convert the bodily
area touched into the form of a figure. But each stimulus applied to

1 Goldstein, Ober den Einfluss . . pp. 206-13.

2 As Goldstein does, ibid., pp. 167-206.

3 Cf. supra the general discussion of the ‘association of ideas’, pp. 17 and fi'.

4 A patient named Schneider says he needs Anhahspunkte.

108

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

the body of the normal person arouses a kind of ‘potential move¬
ment’, rather than an actual one; the part of the body in question
sheds its anonymity, is revealed, by the presence of a particular ten¬
sion, as a certain power of action within the framework of the ana¬
tomical apparatus. In the case of the normal subject, the body is
available not only in real situations into which it is drawn. It can turn
aside from the world, apply its activity to stimuli which affect its
sensory surfaces, lend itself to experimentation, and generally speak¬
ing take its place in the realm of the potential. It is because of its con¬
finement within the actual that an unsound sense of touch calls for
special movements designed to localize stimuli, and for the same
reason the patient substitutes, for tactile recognition and perception,
a laborious decoding of stimuli and deduction of objects. For a key,
for instance, to appear as such in my tactile experience, a kind of
fulness of touch is required, a tactile field in which local impressions
may be co-ordinated into a shape just as notes are mere stepping-
stones in a melody; and that very viscosity of tactile data which
makes the body dependent upon actual situations reduces the object
to a collection of successive ‘characteristics’, perception to an abstract
account, recognition to a rational synthesis or a plausible conjecture,
and strips the object of its carnal presence and facticity. Whereas in
the normal person every event related to movement or sense of touch
causes consciousness to put up a host of intentions which run from
the body as the centre of potential action either towards the body
itself or towards the object, in the case of the patient, on the other
hand, the tactile impression remains opaque and sealed up. It may
well draw the grasping hand towards itself, but does not stand in
front of the hand in the manner of a thing which can be pointed out.
The normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without
shifting from its position as a possibility, acquires a sort of actuality.
In the patient’s case, however, the field of actuality is limited to what
is met with in the shape of a real contact or is related to these data by
some explicit process of deduction.

The analysis of ‘abstract movement’ in patients throws into relief
this possession of space, this spatial existence which is the primary
condition of all living perception. If the patient is ordered to shut his
eyes and then perform an abstract movement, a set of preparatory
operations is called for in order to enable him to ‘find’ the operative
limb, the direction or pace of the movement, and finally the plane in
which it is to be executed. If, for instance, he is ordered to move his
arm, with no detail as to how, he is first of all. perplexed. Then he
moves his whole body and after a time his movements are confined to
the arm, which the subject eventually ‘finds’. If it is a question of
‘raising his arm’ the patient must also ‘find’ his head (which symbolizes

109

THE BODY

‘up’ for him) by means of a set of pendulum movements which are
continued throughout the action and which serve to establish the
objective. If the subject is asked to trace a square or a circle in the air,
he first ‘finds’ his arm, then lifts it in front of him as a normal subject
would do to find a wall in the dark, and finally he makes a few rough
movements in a straight line or describing various curves, and if one
of these happens to be circular he promptly completes the circle.
Moreover he can find the requisite movement only in a certain plane
which is not quite perpendicular to the ground, and apart from this
special plane he cannot begin to trace the figures.1 Clearly the patient
finds in his body only an amorphous mass into which actual move¬
ment alone introduces divisions and links. In looking to his body to
perform the movement for him he is like a speaker who cannot utter
a word without following a text written beforehand. The patient him¬
self neither seeks nor finds his movement, but moves his body about
until the movement comes. The order given is not meaningless to
him, since he recognizes the inadequacy of his first attempts, and also
since, if a fortuitous gesture produces the required movement, he is
aware of it and can immediately turn his piece of good fortune to
account. But if the order has an intellectual significance for him and
not a motor one, it does not communicate anything to him as a
mobile subject; he may well find in the shape of a movement per¬
formed an illustration of the order given, but he can never convert
the thought of a movement into actual movement. What he lacks is
neither motility nor thought, and we are brought to the recognition
of something between movement as a third person process and
thought as a representation of movement — something which is an
anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective and is ensured by the body
itself as a motor power, a ‘motor project’ ( Bewegungsentwurf ), a
‘motor intentionality’ in the absence of which the order remains a
dead letter. The patient either conceives the ideal formula for the
movement, or else he launches his body into blind attempts to per¬
form it, whereas for the normal person every movement is, indis¬
solubly, movement and consciousness of movement. This can be ex¬
pressed by saying that for the normal person every movement has a
background , and that the movement and its background are ‘moments
of a unique totality’.2 The background to the movement is not a re¬
presentation associated or linked externally with the movement itself,
but is immanent in the movement inspiring and sustaining it at every
moment. The plunge into action is, from the subject’s point of view,

1 Goldstein, Uber den Einfluss . . pp. 213-22.

2 Goldstein, Uber die Abhdngigkeii, p. 161 ; Bewegung und Hintergrund besliir.-
men sich wechselseitig, sind eigentlich nur zwei herausgegrifTene Momente eines
einheitlichen Ganzes.

110

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

an original way of relating himself to the object, and is on the same
footing as perception. Light is thus thrown upon the distinction be¬
tween abstract and concrete movement: the background to concrete
movement is the world as given, whereas the background to abstract
movement is built up. When I motion my friend to come nearer, my
intention is not a thought prepared within me and I do not perceive
the signal in my body. I beckon across the world, I beckon over there,
where my friend is ; the distance between us, his consent or refusal are
immediately read in my gesture; there is not a perception followed by
a movement, for both form a system which varies as a whole. If, for
example, noticing that there is no response to my move, I vary my
gesture, we have here, not two distinct acts of consciousness. What
happens is that I see my partner’s unwillingness, and my gesture of
impatience emerges from this situation without any intervening
thought.1 If I then execute ‘the same’ movement, but without having
any present or even imaginary partner in mind, and treat it as ‘a set
of movements in themselves’ ; 2 if, that is, I perform a ‘flexion’ of the
forearm in relation to the upper arm, with ‘supination’ of the arm and
‘flexion’ of the fingers, my body, which a moment ago was the vehicle
of the movement, now becomes its end ; its motor project is no longer
directed towards someone in the world, but towards my fore and
upper arm, and my fingers; and it is directed towards them, further¬
more, in so far as they are capable of breaking with their involvement
in the given world and giving shape round about me to an imaginary
situation, or even in so far as, independently of any fictitious partner,
I look with curiosity upon this strange signifying contrivance and set
it to work for my amusement.3 The abstract movement carves out
within that plenum of the world in which concrete movement took
place a zone of reflection and subjectivity; it superimposes upon
physical space a potential or human space. Concrete movement is
therefore centripetal whereas abstract movement is centrifugal. The
former occurs in the realm of being or of the actual, the latter on the
other hand in that of the possible or the non-existent; the first adheres
to a given background, the second throws out its own background.
The normal function which makes abstract movement possible is one
of ‘projection’ whereby the subject of movement keeps in front of
him an area of free space in which what does not naturally exist may
take on a semblance of existence. One knows of patients with powers

1 Goldstein, Vber die Abhdngigkeit , . . p. 161.

2 Ibid.

3 Goldstein ( Ober die Abhdngigkeit . . pp. 160 and ff.) merely says that the
background of abstract movement is the body, and this is true in that the body
during abstract movement is no longer merely the vehicle, but becomes the aim
of the movement. Nevertheless, by changing function, it also changes its existen¬
tial modality and passes from the actual to the possible.

Ill

THE BODY

less seriously affected than Schneider’s Who perceive forms, distances
and objects in themselves, but who are unable either to trace in objects
the directions which are useful from the point of view of action, or
to arrange them according to some given principle, or generally to
assign to the spatial scene delimitations in human terms which make
it the field of our action. For instance, patients faced with a dead end
in a labyrinth have difficulty in finding ‘the opposite direction’. If a
ruler is laid between them and the doctor they cannot, to order, dis¬
tribute the objects between ‘their side’ and ‘the doctor’s side’. They
are very inaccurate in pointing out, on another person’s arm, the
point corresponding to the one stimulated on their own. Knowing
that the month is March and the day a Monday, they will have diffi¬
culty in saying what the previous month and day were, though they
may well know by heart the days and months in their correct order.
They are incapable of comparing the number of units contained in
two sets of sticks placed in front of them: they may count the same
stick twice over, or else include in one set of sticks some which belong
to the other.1 The reason is that all these operations require the same
ability to mark out boundaries and directions in the given world, to
establish lines of force, to keep perspectives in view, in a word, to
organize the given world in accordance with the projects of the pre¬
sent moment, to build into the geographical setting a behavioural
one, a system of meanings outwardly expressive of the subject’s inter¬
nal activity. For these patients the world exists only as one ready¬
made or congealed, whereas for the normal person his projects
polarize the world, bringing magically to view a host of signs which
guide action, as notices in a museum guide the visitor. This function
of ‘projection’ or ‘summoning’ (in the sense in which the medium
summons an absent person and causes him to appear) is also what
makes abstract movement possible: for, in order to be in possession
of my body independently of any urgent task to be performed; in
order to enjoy the use of it as the mood takes me, in order to describe
in the air a movement formulated only verbally or in terms of moral
requirements, I must reverse the natural relationship in which the
body stands to its environment, and a human productive power must
reveal itself through the density of being.

It is in these terms that the disorder discernible in the movements
in question may be described. But it may be thought that this descrip¬
tion (and this criticism has often been made of psychoanalysis) 2

1 Van Woerkom, Sur la notion de Vespace (le sens geometrique), pp. 113-19.

2 Cf. for example, H. Le Savoureux, ‘Un philosophe en face de la Psychanalyse\
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise , February 1939. ‘For Freud the mere fact of having
related symptoms to each other through plausible logical links is a sufficient con¬
firmation that a psychoanalytical interpretation, which means a psychological
one, is soundly based. The adoption of logical coherency as the criterion for

112

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

presents to us only the significance or essence of the disease and not
its cause. Science, it may be objected, waits upon explanation, which
means looking beneath phenomena for the circumstances upon which
they depend, in accordance with the tried methods of induction.
Here, for example, we know that the motor disorders of Schneider
are related to far-reaching disorders of sight, which in turn arise from
the occipital injury which lies at the root of his condition. Schneider
does not recognize any object by merely looking at it.1 His visual
data are almost-amorphous patches.* * As for objects not in sight, he is
unable to form any visual image of them.3 It is known, on the other
hand, that ‘abstract’ movements become possible for the subject
provided that he keeps his eyes fixed on the limb which is to perform
them.4 Thus the remnant of volitional motility is aided by what
remains of visual knowledge. The famous methods of Mill might
allow us to conclude here that abstract movements and Zeigen are
dependent on the power of visual representation, whereas concrete
movements, which are preserved by the patient as are those imitative
movements, whereby he compensates for his paucity of visual data,
arise from the kinaesthetic or tactile sense, which incidentally was
remarkably exploited by Schneider. It would appear, then, that the
distinction between concrete and abstract movement, like that be¬
tween Greifen and Zeigen , is reducible to the traditional distinction
between tactile and visual, and the function of projection or evoca¬
tion, which we brought to light above, to perception and visual
representation.5

accepting an interpretation brings Freudian proof much nearer to metaphysical
deduction than to scientific explanation ... In the medical treatment of mental
disease, psychological probability is regarded as practically worthless in the in¬
vestigation of causes' (p. 318).

J He succeeds only by being allowed ‘imitative movements' {mchfahrende
Bewegimgen) of the head, hands or fingers which sketch in the imperfect outline of
the object. Gelb and Goldstein, Zur Psychologic des optischen IVahrnehmtmgfriwd
Erkemimgs vorgattges t Psychohgischc Analyses hirnpmhohglscher Fade, Chap. I,

* The patient's visual data lack any specific and characteristic structure. His
impressions, unlike those of a normal person's, have no firm configuration; they
have not, for instance, the typical look of a “square", a “triangle", a “straight
line" or a “curve". Before him he sees only patches in which his sight allows him
to pick out only salient characteristics, such as height and breadth and their rela-
t Ion to each other’. (Ibid., p. 77.) A gardener sweeping a path fifty yards away is
'a long streak with something moving backwards and forwards towards the top
of it' (p, 108). In the street the patient distinguishes men from vehicles by the fact
that ‘men arc all the same; long and thin— vehicles are wide, umnisiakeabfy so,
and much thicker' (ibid.).

3 Ibid., p. 116.

4 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber den Einfluss . . pp. 213-22.

5 It was in this sense that Gelb and Goldstein interpreted Schneider’s case in
the first works which they devoted to him ( Zur Psychologie . . . and Vber den

113

THE BODY

In reality, an inductive analysis carried out according to Mill’s
methods is fruitless. For the disturbances of abstract movement and
Zeigen are encountered not only in cases of psychological blindness,
but also in cerebellar patients and in many other disorders.* 1 There is
no justification for picking out as crucial just one of these concord¬
ances and using it to ‘explain’ the act of pointing out. In face of the
ambiguity of facts one must abandon the mere statistical noting-
down of coincidences, and try to ‘understand’ the relation which they
reveal. In cerebellar cases it is observed that visual as distinct from
auditory stimuli produce only imperfect motor reactions, and yet
there is with them no reason to presume any primary disturbance of
the visual function. It is not because the latter is deficient that desig¬
natory movements become impossible, but, on the contrary, because
the attitude of Zeigen is impossible that the visual stimuli arouse only
partial reactions. We must admit that the sound, of itself, prompts
rather a grasping movement, and visual perception the act of point¬
ing. The sound always leads us towards its content, its significance
for us; in visual presentation, on the other hand, we can much more
easily '‘disregard” the content and we are drawn much more defi¬
nitely towards the part of space where the object is to be found/2 A
meaning then is definable less in terms of the indescribable quality of
its ‘mental contents’ than in terms of a certain manner of presenting
its object, of its epistemological structure having its quality as con¬
crete realization and, in the language of Kant, exhibition. The doctor
who brings to bear upon the patient ‘visual’ or ‘auditory stimuli’
believes that he is testing ‘visual’ or ‘auditory sensibility’ and drawing
up an inventory of sensible qualities which make up consciousness
(in empiricist language) or of the material at the disposal of cognition
(in intellectualist language). The doctor and the psychologist borrow
the concepts of ‘sight’ and ‘hearing’ from common sense which con¬
siders them uni vocal, because our body includes as a matter of fact
sets of visual and auditory apparatus which are anatomically distinct
and to which isolatable contents of consciousness are supposed to
correspond according to a general postulate of ‘constancy’3 which
expresses our natural ignorance of ourselves. But, when taken up and
systematically applied by science these conTuscd concepts hinder re¬
search and finally necessitate a general revision of these naive cate*

Einfluss). It will be seen haw subsequently {Ober die Abhdngigkett and particularly
Zeigen und Greifen and the works published under their editorship by Benary,
Hocheimer and Stcinfdd) they broadened their diagnosis. The progress of their
analysis is a particularly clear example of the progress of psychology.

1 Zeigen und Greifen , p. 456.

8 Ibid., pp. 458-9.

• Cf. above. Introduction, p. 7.

114

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

gories. In fact, what the measuring of thresholds tests is functions
prior to any specific identification of sensible qualities and to the
elaboration of knowledge ; it is the way in which the subject causes
his surroundings to exist for him, either as a pole of activity and the
terminus of an act of seizure or expulsion, or else as a spectacle and
theme of knowledge. The motor disturbances of cerebellar cases and
those of psychological, blindness can be co-ordinated only if we
identify the basis of movement and vision not as a collection of
sensible qualities but as a certain way of giving form or structure to
our environment. We are led back by the use of this very inductive
method to ‘metaphysical’ questions which positivism would wish to
avoid. Induction succeeds only provided that it is not restricted to
noting things as present or absent, with concomitant variations, and
that it conceives and comprehends facts as subsumed under ideas not
contained in them. It is not a matter of choosing between a descrip¬
tion of the disorder which furnishes the meaning and an explanation
which provides the cause. There are, moreover, no explanations with¬
out comprehension.

But let us make our objection more explicit. On examination it is
seen to be twofold.

1. The ‘cause’ of a ‘psychic fact’ is never another ‘psychic fact’
capable of being disclosed to straightforward observation. For ex¬
ample, visual representation does not explain abstract movement, for
it is itself endowed with the same power of throwing out a spectacle
which is revealed in abstract movement and the act of pointing. Now
this power is not dependent upon the senses, not even upon any inner
sense. Let it be said provisionally that it is disclosed only to a certain
kind of reflection, the nature of which we shall examine closely later.
It follows that psychological induction is not a mere inventory of
facts. Psychology does not provide its explanations by identifying,
among a collection of facts, the invariable and unconditioned ante¬
cedent. It conceives or comprehends facts in exactly the same way as
physical induction, not content to note empirical sequences, creates
notions capable of co-ordinating facts. That is why, in psychology as
in physics, no induction can avail itself of any crucial experiment.
Since explanation is not discovered but created, it is never given with
the fact, but is always simply a probable interpretation. So far we
have merely applied to psychology what has been fully demonstrated
with regard to physical induction,1 and our first complaint is against
the empiricist manner of conceiving induction and against Mill’s
methods.

2. Now we shall see that this first objection covers a second one. In
psychology it is not only empiricism that has to be challenged. It is

1 Cf. Brunschvicg, V Experience humaine et la Causality physique , Part I.

115

THE BODY

the inductive method and causal thinking generally. The object of
psychology is such that it cannot possibly be expressed as the rela¬
tions of function to variable. Let us make these two points clear in
some detail.

(i) We notice that Schneider’s motor disturbances are associated
with large-scale deficiency of knowledge gained by visual means. We
are therefore tempted to regard psychological blindness as a distinc¬
tive variety of pure tactile behaviour, and, since consciousness of
bodily space and abstract movement, which has potential space in
view, are almost totally absent, we are inclined to conclude that the
sense of touch alone gives us no experience of objective space.1 We
shall then say that touch by itself is not of a kind to provide a back¬
ground to movement, that is to say, to set out in front of the moving
subject his departure and arrival points in strict simultaneity. The
patient tries to provide for himself a ‘kinacstiieiic background' by
means of preparatory movements, and is successful in thus ‘marking’
the position of his body at the outset and in launching into the
movement, yet this kinaesthetic background is precarious, and could
not possibly equal the visual background in constantly relating
motion to its points of departure and arrival throughout the move¬
ment’s duration. It is thrown out of gear by the movement itself and
needs to be restored after each phase of the movement. That is why,
as we propose to put it, Schneider’s abstract movements have lost
their melodic flow, why they are made up of fragments placed end to
end, and why they often ‘run off the rails’ on the way. The practical
field which Schneider lacks is none other than the visual field.4 But in
order to be justified in relating, in psychological blindness, the motor
to the visual disturbance, and, in the normal subject, the projective
function to vision as its invariable and unconditioned antecedent,
then we must be sure that only the visual data have been affected by
the disease and that all other pre-conditions of behaviour, particu¬
larly tactile experience, have been left exactly as they were in the
normal person. Can we confidently maintain this? At this stage it
becomes clear that the facts are ambiguous, that no experience is
decisive and no explanation final. When we observe that a normal
subject is capable of making abstract movements with his eyes shut,
and that the tactile experience of the normal person is sufficient to
govern motility, it can always be retorted that the tactile data of the
normal person have received their objective structure from visual
data according to the old conception of the education of the senses.
When we observe that a blind person is able to localize stimuli on the
surface of his body and perform abstract movements— apart from

1 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber den Einfluss .... pp. 227-50.

1 Goldstein, Uber die Abhangigkeit, pp. 163 and ff,

116

THE SPATIALITY OP ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

the fact that there are examples of preparatory movements among the
blind, the reply can always be made that frequent associations have
imparted the qualitative colouring of kinaesthetic impressions to tac¬
tile ones and welded the former into a quasi-simultaneous occur¬
rence.1 Indeed, many factors in the behaviour of patients2 3 lead one
to suspect some primary modification of tactile experience. For ex¬
ample, a subject may know how to knock at a door, but he can no
longer do so if the door is hidden or merely out of reach. In the latter
case, the patient cannot perform the action of knocking or opening
in a void, even if his eyes are open and fixed on the door? How can we
invoke visual failure here, when the patient enjoys a visual perception
of the objective which is ordinarily sufficient to govern his movements
more or less satisfactorily? Have we not brought to light a primary
disturbance of touch? Clearly, for an object to be able to produce a
movement it must be included in the patient’s field of movement, and
the disturbance consists of a shrinkage in this field, which is hence¬
forth limited to objects actually touchable, and exclusive of that
horizon of possible touch which surrounds them for the normal per¬
son. The deficiency would appear, in the last resort, to affect a func¬
tion much deeper than vision, deeper too than touch conceived as a
collection of given qualities. It appears to concern the subject’s vital
area: that opening upon the world which has the effect of making
objects at present out of reach count notwithstanding for the normal
person; they exist for him as touchable things and are part of his
world of movement. According to this hypothesis, when patients ob¬
serve their hand and the goal of their action throughout a movement,4
we must understand this not as a mere amplification of a normal
procedure, for the recourse to vision is to be seen as necessitated
merely by the collapse of the sense of potential touch. But, on the
strictly inductive plane this interpretation, in which touch is primarily
involved, remains optional, and we may always prefer, with Gold¬
stein, a different one: according to this the patient, wishing to strike,
needs a goal within physical reach, precisely because his sight, in
which he is deficient, is no longer adequate to provide a substantial
background to the movement. There is, then, no fact capable of
decisively bearing out that the tactile experience of patients is or is
not identical with that of normal people, and Goldstein’s conception,
like the physical theory, can always be reconciled with the facts, given
some auxiliary hypothesis. No rigorously exclusive interpretation
is possible in psychology as in physics.

1 Goldstein, Vber den Einfluss . . pp. 244 and ff.

2 We are here concerned with the case of S which Goldstein himself puts along¬
side the Schneider case, in his book Vber die Abhdngigkeit . . .

3 Vber die Abhdngigkeit . . pp. 178-84. 4 Ibid., p. 150.

117

THE BODY

However, if we look more closely, we shall see that the impossibi¬
lity of a decif =: experiment, in psychology, is attributable to special
reasons. It arises from the very nature of the object under investiga¬
tion, namely behaviour, and leads to important consequences. Be¬
tween theories, neither of which is either ruled out or completely
vindicated by the facts, physics can nevertheless choose according to
the degree of probability, that is, according to the number of facts
which either succeeds in co-ordinating without loading itself with
auxiliary hypotheses elaborated to meet the needs of the case. In
psychology this criterion is lacking: no auxiliary hypothesis is neces¬
sary, as we have seen, to explain in terms of visual disturbance the
impossibility of the action of ‘knocking’ in front of a door. Not only
do we never arrive at an exclusive interpretation (deficiency of sense
of potential touch or deficiency of visual world), but, what is more,
we necessarily have to do with equally probable interpretations be¬
cause ‘visual representations’, ‘abstract movement’ and ‘sense of
potential touch’ are only different names for one and the same central
phenomenon. Hence psychology is not in the same position as phy¬
sics ; that is to say, confined within the probability of inductions, it
is unable to choose, even on the basis of plausibility, between
hypotheses which from a strictly inductive point of view remain
incompatible. For an induction, even when it is merely probable,
to remain a possibility, the ‘visual representation’ or the ‘tactile
perception’ must be the cause of the abstract movement, or
alternatively both must be effects of another cause. The three or four
terms must be able to be considered from the outside and we must
be able to pick out the correlative variations. But if they should
prove incapable of being isolated, if each of them presupposed the
rest, the failure involved would not be a failure of empiricism or
of attempts to find a decisive experiment, it would be the failure
of the inductive method or of causal thinking in the realm of
psychology. We thus arrive at the second point that we were trying
to make.

(ii) If, as Goldstein recognizes, the co-existence of the tactile with
the visual data, in the case of the normal person, modifies the former
sufficiently to enable them to provide a background for abstract
movement, the tactile data of the patient, which are cut off from the
visual contribution, cannot be forthwith identified with those of the
normal person. Tactile and visual data, says Goldstein, are not
juxtaposed in the normal person; the former derive from the proxi¬
mity of the latter a ‘qualitative colouring’ which they have lost for
Schneider. It follows, he adds, that the study of the purely tactile is
impossible as far as the normal person is concerned, and that de¬
rangement alone provides a picture of what tactile experience reduced

118

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

to itself would comprise.1 The conclusion is sound, but it amounts to
maintaining that the word ‘touch’ has not the same meaning applied
to the normal as to the abnormal subject, that the ‘purely tactile’ is
a pathological phenomenon which does not enter as a component
into normal experience. It is further implied that illness, by disturbing
the visual function, has not disclosed the pure essence of touch, that
it has indeed changed the whole of the subject’s experience, or, if one
prefers it put in this way, that there is not in the normal subject a
tactile experience and also a visual one, but an integrated experience
to which it is impossible to gauge the contribution of each sense. The
experiences mediated by touch in psychological blindness have no¬
thing in common with those which touch mediates in the normal sub¬
ject, and neither set really deserves to be called ‘tactile’ data. Tactile
experience is not a condition apart which might be kept constant
while the ‘visual’ experience was varied with a view to pinning on to
each its own causality, nor is behaviour a function of these variables.
It is on the contrary presupposed in defining them just as each is
presupposed in defining the other.2 Psychological blindness, defi¬
ciency of sense of touch and motor disturbances are three expressions
of a more fundamental disturbance through which they can be under¬
stood and not three component factors of morbid behaviour. Visual
representations, tactile data and motility are three phenomena which

1 Vber den Einfluss . . pp. 227 and ff.

* On the conditioning of sensory data by motility, cf, Structure du Comport e~
mentt p. 41 , and the experiments which show that a dog when chained tip does not
perceive as docs a dog free in its movements. The procedures of traditional
psychology are strangely mixed, in the writings of Gelb and Goldstein, with the
concrete emphasis derived from Gestalt psychology. They recognize clearly
enough that the perceiving subject reacts as a whole, but the totality is conceived
as a mixture and touch receives from its co-existencc with sight only a ‘qualitative
colouring’, whereas according to the spirit of Gestalt psychology, two sensory
realms can communicate only by becoming absorbed as inseparable constituents
into an intersensory system. Now if tactile data, along with visual ones, make up
a composite formation, it is clearly on condition that they themselves, on their
own ground, bring into being a spatial organization, for otherwise the connection
between touch and sight would be an external association, and the tactile data
would remain, in the total configuration, what they are taken each in isolation —
two consequences equally ruled out by formalism. It is fair to add that, in another
work (Bcricht fiber den IX Kongress fur experimentelle Psychologic in Mundien,
Die psychofogische BedeuUmg pathologic her St&rungen der Raimwahniehmiwg),
Gclb himself points out the inadequacy of the work which we have just analysed.
We may not even speak, he says, of a coalescence of touch and sight in the normal
subject, or even make any distinction between these two components in reactions
to space. Both pure tactile and pure visual experience, with its space of juxta¬
position and its represented spaces, are products of analysis. There is a concrete
manipulation of space in which all senses collaborate in an ‘undifibren dated unity*
p. 76) and the sense of touch is ill-adapted only to the theoretical knowledge of
space.

119

THE BODY

stand out sharply within the unity of behaviour. When, by reason of
the fact that they show correlated variations, we try to explain one in
terms of the other, we forget, for example, that the act of visual re¬
presentation, as is proved in cerebellar cases, already presupposes the
same power of projection as is seen in abstract movement and in the
act of pointing out, and thus we beg the question. Inductive and
causal thought, by vesting in vision or touch or any one de facto
datum the power of projection which is found in them all, conceals
that power from us and blinds us to that dimension of behaviour
which is precisely the one with which psychology is concerned. In
physics, the establishment of a law requires the scientist to conceive
the idea under which the facts are to be co-ordinated, and this idea,
which is not found in the facts, will never be verified by any conclu¬
sive experiment, and will never be more than probable. But it is still
the idea of a causal link, in the sense of a relationship of function to
variable. Atmospheric pressure had to be invented but, after all, it
was still a third person process, the function of a certain number of
variables. In so far as behaviour is a form, in which ‘visual’ and
‘tactile contents’, sensibility and motility appear only as inseparable
moments, it remains inaccessible to causal thought and is capable of
being apprehended only by another kind of thought, that which
grasps its object as it comes into being and as it appears to the person
experiencing it, with the atmosphere of meaning then surrounding it,
and which tries to infiltrate into that atmosphere in order to discover,
behind scattered facts and symptoms, the subject’s whole being,
when he is normal, or the basic disturbance, when he is a patient.

We cannot explain disturbances in the power of abstract movement
in terms of loss of visual contents, nor, consequently, the function of
projection in terms of the actual presence of these contents. So one
method alone still seems possible: it consists in reconstituting the
basic disturbance by going back from the symptoms not to a cause
which is itself observable, but to a reason or intelligible condition of
possibility for the state of affairs. It involves treating the human sub¬
ject as an irresolvable consciousness which is wholly present in every
one of its manifestations. If the disturbance is not to be related to the
contents, it must be linked to the form of knowledge; if psychology
is not empiricist and explicative, it ought to be rationalistic and
reflective. In exactly the same way as the act of naming,1 the act of
pointing out presupposes that the object, instead of being ap¬
proached, grasped and absorbed by the body, is kept at a distance
and stands as a picture in front of the patient. Plato still allowed the
empiricist the power of pointing a finger at things, but the truth is
that even this silent gesture is impossible if what is pointed out is not
1 Cf. Gelb and Goldstein, Vber Farbennamenamnesie.

120

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

already torn from instantaneous existence and monadic existence,
and treated as representative of its previous appearances in me, and
of its simultaneous appearances in others, in other words, subsumed
under some category and promoted to the status of a concept. If the
patient is no longer able to point to some part of his body which is
touched, it is because he is no longer a subject face to face with an
objective world, and can no longer take up a ‘categorial attitude’.1 In
the same way, abstract, movement is endangered in so far as it pre¬
supposes awareness of an objective, is borne on by that awareness,
and is movement for itself. Indeed it is not triggered off by any
existing object, but is clearly centrifugal, outlining in space a gratui¬
tous intention which has reference to one’s own body, making an
object of it instead of going through it to link up with things by means
of it. It is, then, diffused with a power of objectification, a ‘symbolical
function’,2 a ‘representative function’,3 a power of ‘projection’4
which is, moreover, already at work in forming ‘things’. It consists in
treating sense-data as mutually representative, and also collectively
representative of an ‘eidos’; in giving a meaning to these data, in
breathing a spirit into them, in systematizing them, in centring a
plurality of experiences round one intelligible core, in bringing to
light in them an identifiable unity when seen in different perspectives.
To sum up, it consists in placing beneath the flow of impressions an
explanatory invariant, and in giving a form to the stuff of experience.
Now it is not possible to maintain that consciousness has this power,
it is this power itself. As soon as there is consciousness, and in order
that there may be consciousness, there must be something to be con¬
scious of, an intentional object, and consciousness can move towards
this object only to the extent that it ‘derealizes’ itself and throws itself
into it, only if it is wholly in this reference to . . . something, only if
it is a pure meaning-giving act. If a being is consciousness, he must
be nothing but a network of intentions. If he ceases to be definable in
terms of the act of sense-giving, he relapses into the condition of a
thing, the thing being precisely what does not know, what slumbers
in absolute ignorance of itself and the world, what consequently is
not a true ‘self’, i.e. a ‘for-itself and has only a spatio-temporal form
of individuation, existence in itself.5 Consciousness, therefore, does

1 Gelb and Goldstein, Zeigen unci Greifen , pp. 456-7.

2 Head.

3 Bouman and Grtinbaum.

4 Van Woerkom.

5 Husserl has often been credited with this distinction. In fact, it is found
in Descartes and Kant. In our opinion Husserl’s originality lies beyond the notion
of intentionality; it is to be found in the elaboration of this notion and in the
discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality,
which others have called existence.

121

THE BODY

not admit of degree. If the patient no longer exists as a consciousness,
he must then exist as a thing. Either movement is movement for itself,
in which case the ‘stimulus’ is not its cause but its intentional object —
or else it disintegrates and is dispersed in existence in itself, and be¬
comes an objective process in the body, whose phases are successive
but unknown to each other. The special status of concrete movements
in illness is explained by seeing them as reflexes in the traditional
sense. The patient’s hand meets the point on his body where the
mosquito has settled because pre-established nerve circuits, not the
excitation, control the reaction. Actions performed in the course of
his work are preserved because they are dependent upon firmly
rooted conditioned reflexes. They persist in spite of psychic deficien¬
cies because they are movements in themselves. The distinction be¬
tween concrete and abstract movement, between Greifen and Zeigen
comes down to that between the physiological and the psychic,
existence in itself and existence for itself.1

But we shall see that in reality the first distinction, far from cover¬
ing also the second, is incompatible with it. Every ‘physiological ex¬
planation’ tends to become generalized. If the grasping action or the
concrete movement is guaranteed by some factual connection be¬
tween each point on the skin and the motor muscles which guide the

1 Gelb and Goldstein sometimes tend to interpret phenomena in this sense.
They have done more than anyone to go beyond the traditional dualism of auto¬
matism and consciousness. Dut they have never named this third term between the
psychic and the physiological, between the for itself and the in itself to which
their analyses always led them and which we call existence. Hence their earliest
works often fall back on the traditional dichotomy of body and consciousness:
‘The act of seizing is, much more than that of pointing, determined by relation¬
ships existing between the organism and its surrounding field . . it is less a
question of relations consciously formed than of immediate reactions . . \vc arc
here concerned with a much more vital process, one describable in biological
language as primitive.’' f Zeigen und Greifen, p; 459.) ‘The act of seizing remains
completely insensitive to modifications affecting the conscious part of this per¬
formance, to any deficiency of simultaneous apprehension (in psychological
blindness), to the instability of perceived space (in cerebellar cases), to disturb¬
ances of sensitivity (in certain cortical lesions), because it is not carried out in
this objective domain. It is preserved as long as the peripheral excitations are still
sufficient to govern it accurately/ ( Zeigen und Greifen, p. 460.) Gelb and Gold¬
stein question the existence of localizing reflex movements (Henri), but only in
so far as there might be a tendency to regard them as innate. They retain the idea
of an ‘automatic localization not inclusive of any awareness or space, since it
operates even during sleep" (thus conceived as total unconsciousness), It is cer¬
tainly ‘learnt’ from the time of comprehensive reactions of the whole body to
tactile stimuli in babyhood— but this apprenticeship is conceived as the accumula¬
tion of ‘kinacsthetic residues’ which are ‘awakened’ in the normal adult by ex¬
ternal excitations, and which direct him towards the appropriate outlets {0 her den
Einfluss . . ., pp. 167-206), In correcily performing the actions required by his
trade, Schneider shows that they arc habitual totalities which demand no con¬
sciousness of space (ibid., pp. 221-2).

122

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

hand, it is difficult to see why the same nerve circuit communicating
a scarcely different movement to the same muscles should not guaran¬
tee the gesture of Zeigen as it does the movement of Greifen. Between
the mosquito which pricks the skin and the ruler which the doctor
presses on the same spot, the physical difference is not great enough
to explain why the grasping movement is possible, but the act of
pointing impossible. The two ‘stimuli’ are really distinguishable only
if we take into account their affective value or biological meaning,
and the two responses cease to merge into one another only if we
consider the Zeigen and the Greifen as two ways of relating to the
object and two types of being in the world. But this is precisely what
cannot be done once we have reduced the living body to the condition
of an object. If it is once conceded that it may be the seat of third
person processes, nothing in behaviour can be reserved for conscious¬
ness. Both gestures and movements, employing as they do the same
organ-objects, the same nerve-objects, must be given their place on
the map of interiorless processes, and inserted in the compactly
woven stuff of ‘physiological conditions’. Does not the patient who,
in doing his job, moves his hand towards a tool lying on the table,
displace the segments of his arm exactly as he would have to do to
perform the abstract movement of extending it? Does not an every¬
day gesture involve a series of muscular contractions and innerva¬
tions? It is therefore impossible to set limits to psychological ex¬
planation. In another way it is impossible also to set limits to con¬
sciousness. If we relate the act of pointing to consciousness, if once
the stimulus can cease to be the cause of the reaction and become its
intentional object, it becomes inconceivable that it should ever func¬
tion as a pure cause or that the movement should ever be blind. For
if ‘abstract’ movements are possible, in which consciousness of the
starting and finishing points is present, we must at every moment in
our life know where our body is without having to look for it as we
look for an object moved from its place during our absence. Even
‘automatic’ movements must therefore announce themselves to our
consciousness, which means that there never occur, in our bodies,
movements in themselves. And if all objective space is for intellectual
consciousness only, we must recognize the categorial attitude in the
movement of grasping itself.1 Like physiological causality, arrival at

1 Goldstein himself, who tended (as we have seen in the preceding note) to
relate Greifen to the body and Zeigen to the categorial attitude, is forced to go
back on this ‘explanation’. The act of grasping, he says, may ‘be performed to
order, and the patient tries to grasp. In order to do so he does not need to be
aware of the point in space towards which he thrusts forward his hand, but he
nevertheless has a feeling of orientation in space . . .* (Zeigen und Greifen , p. 461).
The act of grasping, as found in normal subjects, ‘still demands a categorial and
conscious attitude’ (ibid., p. 465).

123

THE BODY

self-awareness cannot start anywhere. We must either reject physio¬
logical explanation or admit that it is all-inclusive — either deny con¬
sciousness or accept it as comprehensive. We cannot relate certain
movements to bodily mechanism and others to consciousness. The
body and consciousness are not mutually limiting, they can be only
parallel. Any physiological explanation becomes generalized into
mechanistic physiology, any achievement of self-awareness into in-
tellectualist psychology, and mechanistic physiology or intellectualist
psychology bring behaviour down to the same uniform level and wipe
out the distinction between abstract and concrete movement, between
Zeigen and Greifen. This distinction can survive only if there are
several ways for the body to be a body , several ways for consciousness
to be consciousness . As long as the body is defined in terms of exist¬
ence in itself, it functions uniformly like a mechanism, and as long as
the soul is defined in terms of pure existence for itself, it knows only
objects arrayed before it. The distinction between abstract and con¬
crete movement is therefore not to be confused with that between
body and consciousness; it does not belong to the same reflective
dimension, but finds its place only in the behavioural dimension.
Pathological phenomena introduce variations before our eyes in
something which is not the pure awareness of an object. Any diag¬
nosis, like that of intellectualist psychology, which sees here a col¬
lapse of consciousness and the freeing of automatism, or again that
of an empiricist psychology of contents, would leave the fundamental
disturbance untouched.

The intellectualist analysis, here as everywhere, is less false than
abstract. It is true that the ‘symbolic function’ or the ‘representative
function’ underlies our movements, but it is not a final term for
analysis. It too rests on a certain groundwork. The mistake of intel-
lectualism is to make it self-subsistent, to remove it from the stuff in
which it is realized, and to recognize in us, as a non-derivative entity,
an undistanced presence in the world. For, using this consciousness,
an entirely transparent consciousness, this intentionality which ad¬
mits of no degrees of more or less, as a starting point, everything that
separates us from the real world — error, sickness, madness, in short
incarnation — is reduced to the status of mere appearance. Admit¬
tedly intellectualism does not bring consciousness into being in¬
dependently of its material. For example it takes great care not to
introduce behind the word, the action and the perception, any ‘sym¬
bolic consciousness’ as the common and numerically sole form of
linguistic, perceptual and motor material. There is no ‘general sym¬
bolic faculty’, says Cassirer,1 and analytical reflection does not seek

1 Symbol vermogen schlechthin, Cassirer, Philosophie der symbol ischen For men
III, p. 320.

124

THE SPAT1ALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

to establish between pathological phenomena relating to perception,
language and action a ‘community in being’, but a ‘community in
meaning’.1 Just because it has finally gone beyond causal thought and
realism, intellectualist psychology would be able to see thje meaning
or essence of illness, and recognize a unity of consciousness which is
not evident on the plane of being, and which is vouched for, in its
own eyes, on the plane of truth. But the distinction between com¬
munity in being and community in sense, the conscious passage from
the existential order to the order of value and the transvaluation
which allows meaning and value to be declared autonomous are, for
practical purposes, equivalent to an abstraction, since, from the point
of view finally adopted, the variety of phenomena becomes insignifi¬
cant and incomprehensible. If consciousness is placed outside being,
the latter cannot breach it, the empirical variety of consciousnesses —
morbid, primitive, childlike consciousness, the consciousness of
others — cannot be taken seriously, there is nothing to be known or
understood j one thing alone makes sense: the pure essence of con¬
sciousness. None of these consciousnesses could fail to effect the
Cogito . The lunatic, behind his ravings, his obsessions and lies, knows
that he is raving, that he is allowing himself to be haunted by an
obsession, that he is lying, in short he is not mad, he thinks he is. All
is then for the best and insanity is only perversion of the will. The
analysis of the meaning of illness, once it ends with the symbolic func¬
tion, identifies all disorders as the same, uniting aphasia, apraxia and
agnosia2 and perhaps even has no way of distinguishing them from
schizophrenia.3 It then becomes understandable that doctors and
psychologists should decline the invitation to intellectualism and fall
back, for want of anything better, on the attempts at causal explana¬
tion which at least have the merit of taking into account what is
peculiar to illness, and to each form of it, and which by this means
give at any rate the illusion of possessing actual knowledge. Modern
pathology shows that there is no strictly elective disturbance, but it
shows equally that each one is coloured by the sector of behaviour
which it principally attacks.4 Even if all aphasia, when closely ob¬
served, is seen to involve disturbances of both gnosic * and praxic

1 Gemeinsamkeit im Sein, Gemeinsamkeit im Sinn, ibid.

2 Cf. for example Cassirer, Philosophic der Symbolischen For men, III, Chap. VI,
Paihologie des Symbolbemtsstseins.

8 One can indeed imagine an intellectualist interpretation of schizophrenia
which would equate the atomistic conception of time and the loss of the future
with a collapse of the categorial attitude.

4 Structure du Comportement , pp. 91 and ff.

* Gnosia: The perceptive faculty, enabling one to recognize the form and
nature of persons and things (Translator’s note).

125

THE BODY

kinds; if all apraxia* involves linguistic and perceptual disturbances,
and all agnosia f disturbances of language and action, the fact re¬
mains that the core of these disorders is here to be found in the
domain of language, there in that of perception, and elsewhere in
that of action. When we invoke in all these cases the symbolic func¬
tion, we are, it is true, characterizing the structure common to the
different derangements, but this structure should not be separated
from the stuff through which on each occasion it is realized, if not
electively, at least in great measure. After all Schneider’s trouble was
not initially metaphysical, for it was a shell splinter which wounded
him at the back of the head. The damage to his sight was serious, but
it would be ridiculous, as we have said, to explain all the other defi¬
ciencies in terms of the visual one as their cause; but no less ridiculous
to think that the shell splinter directly struck symbolic consciousness.
It was through his sight that Mind in him was impaired.

Until some means has been discovered whereby we can link the
origin and the essence or meaning of the disturbance; until some de¬
finition is found for a concrete essence , a structure of illness which
shall express both its generality and its particularity, until pheno¬
menology becomes genetic phenomenology, unhelpful reversions to
causal thought and naturalism will remain justified. Our problem
therefore becomes clearer. The task for us is to conceive, between the
linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them
or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship
which shall be neither the reduction of form to content, nor the sub¬
suming of content under an autonomous form. We need to under¬
stand both how Schneider’s complaint everywhere overshoots par¬
ticular contents — visual, tactile and motor — of his experience, and
how it nevertheless attacks the symbolic function only through the
specially chosen material provided by sight. The senses and one’s own
body generally present the mystery of a collective entity which, with¬
out abandoning its thisness and its individuality, puts forth beyond it¬
self meanings capable of providing a framework for a whole series of
thoughts and experiences. Although Schneider’s trouble affects moti¬
lity and thought as well as perception, the fact remains that what it
damages, particularly in the domain of thought, is his power of ap¬
prehending simultaneous wholes, and in the matter of motility, that,

* Apraxia: (i) A disorder of voluntary movement, consisting in a more or less
complete incapacity to execute purposeful movements, notwithstanding the pre¬
servation of muscular power, sensibility, and co-ordination in general, (ii) A
psychomotor defect in which one is unable to apply to its proper use an object
which one is nevertheless able to name and the uses of which one can describe
(Translator’s note).

t Agnosia : Absence of ability to recognize the form and nature of persons and
things, or the perceptive faculty (Translator’s note).

126

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

so to speak, of taking a bird’s-eye view of movement and projecting
it outside himself. It is then in some sense mental space and practical
space which are destroyed or impaired, and the words themselves are
a sufficient indication of the visual origin of the disturbance. Visual
trouble is not the cause of the other disturbances, particularly that
directly affecting thought. But neither is it a mere consequence of
them. Visual contents, moreover, are not the cause of the function of
projection, but neither is sight a mere opportunity given to Mind to
bring into play a power in itself unconditioned. Visual contents are
taken up, utilized and sublimated to the level of thought by a sym¬
bolical power which transcends them, but it is on the basis of sight
that this power can be constituted. The relationship between matter
and form is called in phenomenological terminology a relationship of
Fundierung : the symbolic function rests on the visual as on a ground;
not that vision is its cause, but because it is that gift of nature which
Mind was called upon to make use of beyond all hope, to which it
was to give a fundamentally new meaning, yet which was needed, not
only to be incarnate, but in order to be at all. Form integrates within
itself the content until the latter finally appears as a mere mode of
form itself, and the historical stages leading up to thought as a ruse of
Reason disguised as Nature. But conversely, even in its intellectual
sublimation, content remains in the nature of a radical contingency,
the initial establishment or foundation1 of knowledge and action, the
first laying hold of being or value, whose concrete richness will never
be finally exhausted by knowledge and action, and whose sponta¬
neous method they will ceaselessly reapply. This dialectic of form and
content is what we have to restore, or rather, since ‘reciprocal action’
is as yet only a compromise with causal thought, and a contradictory
principle, we have to describe the circumstances under which this
contradiction is conceivable, which means existence, the perpetual
re-ordering of fact and hazard by a reason non-existent before and
without those circumstances.2

1 We are translating Husserl’s favourite word : Stiflung.

2 See below third part. E. Cassirer clearly has the same aim when he takes Kant
to task for having most of the time analysed only an ‘intellectual sublimation of
experience’ ( Philosophic der Symbolischen For men, T. Ill, p. 14), when he tries to
express, through the notion of symbolic pregnancy, the absolute simultaneity of
matter and form, or when he adopts for his own purposes Hegel’s declaration that
the mind carries and preserves its past in the depths of its present. But the relation¬
ships between the various symbolic forms remain ambiguous. One always wonders
whether the function of DarsteUurig is a stage in the return to itself of an eternal
consciousness, the shadow of the function of Bedeutung — or whether, on the con¬
trary, the function of Bedeutung is an unforeseeable amplification of the first
constitutive ‘wave’. When Cassirer takes up the Kantian formula according to
which consciousness can analyse only what it has synthesized, he is manifestly
returning to intellectual ism despite the phenomenological and even existentail
analyses which his book contains and which we shall have occasion to use.

127

THE BODY

If we want to observe what underlies the ‘symbolic function’ itself,
we must first of all realize that even intelligence is not reconcilable
with intellectualism. What impairs thought in Schneider’s case is not
that he is incapable of perceiving concrete data as specimens of a
unique eidos, or of subsuming them under some category, but on the
contrary, that he can relate them only by a quite explicit subsump¬
tion. It is noticeable, for example, that the patient does not under¬
stand even such simple analogies as: ‘fur is to cat as plumage is to
bird’, or ‘light is to lamp as heat is to stove’, or ‘eye is to light and
colour as ear is to sounds’. In the same way he cannot understand, in
their metaphorical sense, such common expressions as ‘the chair leg’
or ‘the head of a nail’, although he knows what part of the object is
indicated by these words. It may happen that normal subjects of
equal educational standard are no more able to explain the analogy,
but this is for diametrically opposed reasons. It is easier for the nor¬
mal subject to understand the analogy than to analyse it, whereas the
patient manages to understand only when he has made it explicit by
recourse to conceptual analysis. ‘He looks for ... a common
material characteristic from which he can infer, as from a middle
term, the identity of the two relationships’.1 For example, he thinks
about the analogy between eye and ear and clearly does not under¬
stand it until he can say: ‘The eye and the ear are both sense organs,
therefore they must give rise to something similar.’ If we described
analogy as the apperception of two given terms under a co-ordinating
concept, we should be giving as normal a procedure which is exclu¬
sively pathological, and which represents the roundabout way in
which the paLient makes good the normal understanding of analogy.
‘This freedom in choosing a tertium comparationis on the patient’s
part is the opposite of the intuitive formation of the image in the
normal subject: the latter seizes a specific identity in conceptual
structures, for him the living processes of thought are symmetrical
and mutually complementary. Thus does he ‘catch’ the essentia!
feature of the analogy, and one may always wonder whether a subject
does not remain able to understand, even when this understanding is
not adequately expressed through the formulation and clarification
which he provides.’2 Living thought, then, does not consist in sub¬
suming under some category. The category imposes on the terms
brought together a meaning external to them. It is by drawing upon
already constituted language and upon the sense-relationships which
it holds in store that Schneider succeeds in relating eye to ear as
'sense-organs’. In normal thought eye and ear are immediately ap-

1 Benary, Studien zur Untersuchung der Intelligenz bei einem Fall von Seelen-
blindheit , p. 262.

2 Ibid., p. 263.

128

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

prehended in accordance with the analogy of their function, and their
relationship can be fixed in a ‘common characteristic’ and recorded
in language only because it has first been perceived in its origin in the
singularity of sight and hearing.

It will perhaps be objected that our criticism is valid only against a
summary intellectualism which absorbs thought into a purely logical
activity, whereas analytical reflection goes back to the origin of pre¬
dication, finding behind the judgement of inherence that of relation,
behind subsumption, seen as a mechanical and formal operation, the
categorial act whereby thought bestows upon the subject the meaning
expressed in the predicate. Thus our criticism of the categorial func¬
tion, it might be said, does nothing but reveal, behind the empirical
use of the category, a transcendental use without which indeed the
first is incomprehensible. The distinction, however, between the em¬
pirical and transcendental use conceals the problem rather than
solves it. Critical philosophy duplicates the empirical operations of
thought with a transcendental activity which has the task of bringing
about all those syntheses for which empirical thought provides the
elements. But when I think something at the present moment, the
guarantee of a non-temporal synthesis is insufficient and even un¬
necessary as a basis of my thought. It is now, in the living present that
the synthesis has to be effected, otherwise thought would be cut off
from its transcendental premises. It cannot therefore be asserted that
when I think I take my place once more in the eternal subject which
I have never ceased to be. For the true subject of thought is the person
who achieves the conversion and resumption of action at this very
moment, and it is he who breathes his own life into the non-temporal
ghost. We need therefore to understand how temporal thought links
up with itself and brings about its own synthesis. The fact that the
normal subject immediately grasps that the eye is to sight as the ear
is to hearing shows that the eye and ear are immediately given to him
as means of access to one and the same world, and furthermore that
one world is for him antepredicatively self-evident, so that the equiva¬
lence of the ‘sense-organs’ and their analogy is to be read off from
things and can be lived before being conceived. The Kantian subject
posits a world, but, in order to be able to assert a truth, the actual
subject must in the first place have a world or be in the world, that is,
sustain round about it a system of meanings whose reciprocities,
relationships and involvements do not require to be made explicit in
order to be exploited. When I move about my house, I know without
thinking about it that walking towards the bathroom means passing
near the bedroom, that looking at the window means having the fire¬
place on my left, and in this small world each gesture, each perception
is immediately located in relation to a great number of possible

129

THE BODY

co-ordinates. When I chat with a friend whom I know well, each of
his remarks and each of mine contains, in addition to the meaning it
carries for everybody else, a host of references to the main dimensions
of his character and mine, without our needing to recall previous
conversations with each other. These acquired worlds, which confer
upon my experience its secondary meaning, are themselves carved
out of a primary world which is the basis of the primary meaning. In
the same way there is a ‘world of thoughts’, or a sediment left by our
mental processes, which enables us to rely on our concepts and ac¬
quired judgements as we might on things there in front of us, presented
globally, without there being any need for us to resynthesize them.

In this way there can be for us a sort of mental panorama, with its
clear-cut and its vague areas, a physiognomic disposition of questions
and intellectual situations, such as research, discovery and certainty.
But the word ‘sediment’ should not lead us astray: this acquired
knowledge is not an inert mass in the depths of our consciousness.
My flat is, for me, not a set of closely associated images. It remains
a familiar domain round about me only as long as I still have ‘in my
hands’ or ‘in my legs’ the main distances and directions involved, and
as long as from my body intentional threads run out towards it.
Similarly my acquired thoughts are not a final gain, they continually
draw their sustenance from my present thought, they offer me a
meaning, but I give it back to them. Indeed our available store ex¬
presses for ever afresh the energy of our present consciousness.
Sometimes it weakens, as in moments of weariness, and then my
‘world’ of thought is impoverished and reduced to one or two obses¬
sive ideas; sometimes, on the other hand, I am at the disposal of all
my thoughts and every word spoken in front of me then stimulates
questions and ideas, recasting and reorganizing the mental panorama,
and presenting itself with a precise physiognomy. Thus what is
acquired is truly acquired only if it is taken up again in a fresh
momentum of thought, and a thought is assigned to its place only if
it takes up its place itself. The essence of consciousness is to provide
itself with one or several worlds, to bring into being its own thoughts
before itself, as if they were things, and it demonstrates its vitality in-
divisibly by outlining these landscapes for itself and then by abandon¬
ing them. The world-structure, with its two stages of sedimentation
and spontaneity, is at the core of consciousness, and it is in the light
of a levelling-do wn of the ‘world’ that we shall succeed in understand¬
ing Schneider’s intellectual, perceptual and motor disturbances, with¬
out assimilating them to each other.

The traditional analysis of perception1 distinguishes within it sense-

1 Wc are holding over until the second part a closer study of perception* and
we here confine our remarks to what is essential for the elucidation of the basic

130

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

data and the meaning which they receive from an act of understand¬
ing. Perceptual disturbances, from this point of view, could be only
sensory deficiencies or gnosic disturbances. Schneider’s case, on the
other hand, shows deficiencies affecting the junction of sensitivity and
significance, deficiencies which disclose the existential conditioning of
both. If a fountain pen is shown to the patient, in such a way that the
clip is not seen, the phases of recognition are as follows. ‘It is black,
blue and shiny,’ says the patient. ‘There is a white patch on it, and it
is rather long; it has the shape of a stick. It may be some sort of
instrument. It shines and reflects light. It could also be a coloured
glass.’ The pen is then brought closer and the clip is turned towards
the patient. He goes on: ‘It must be a pencil or a fountain pen.’ (He
touches his breast pocket). ‘It is put there, to make notes with.’* 1 It
is clear that language intervenes at every stage of recognition by
providing possible meanings for what is in fact seen, and that recog¬
nition advances pari passu with linguistic connections : from ‘long’ to
‘shaped like a stick’, from ‘stick’ to ‘instrument’, and from there to
‘instrument for noting things down’, and finally to ‘fountain pen*.
The sense-data are limited to suggesting these meanings as a fact sug¬
gests a hypothesis to the physicist. The patient, like the scientist,
verifies mediately and clarifies his hypothesis by cross-checking facts,
and makes his way blindly towards the one which co-ordinates them
all.

This procedure contrasts with, and by so doing throws into relief,
the spontaneous method of normal perception, that kind of living
system of meanings which makes the concrete essence of the object
immediately recognizable, and allows its ‘sensible properties’ to ap¬
pear only through that essence. It is this familiarity and communica¬
tion with the object which is here interrupted. In the normal subject
the object ‘speaks’ and is significant, the arrangement of colours
straight away ‘means’ something, whereas in the patient the meaning
has to be brought in from elsewhere by a veritable act of interpreta¬
tion. Conversely in the normal person the subject’s intentions are im¬
mediately reflected in the perceptual field, polarizing it, or placing
their seal upon it, or setting up in it, effortlessly, a wave of signifi¬
cance. In the patient the perceptual field has lost this plasticity. If he
is asked to make a square with four triangles identical with a given
one, he replies that it is impossible and that with four triangles only
two squares can be built. The experimenter insists, showing him that
a square has two diagonals and can always be divided into four

and also the motor disturbance in Schneider’s case. These anticipations and
repetitions are unavoidable if, as we shall try to show, perception and experience
of one’s own body are mutually implied.

1 Hochheimer, Analyse eines Seelenblinden von der Sprache, p. 49.

131

THE BODY

triangles. The patient’s reply is: ‘Yes, but that is because the parts
necessarily fit each other. When a square is divided into four, if the
parts are brought together in the correct way, they must make a
square.’1 He knows therefore what a square and a triangle are; even
the relationship between these two meanings does not escape him, at
least after the doctor’s explanations, and he understands that any
square can be split into triangles. But he does not go on to conclude
that any right-angled isosceles triangle can be used to construct a
square, because the construction of this square requires that the given
triangles be arranged differently and that the sense-data must become
the means of illustration of an imaginary meaning. The world in its
entirety no longer suggests any meaning to him and conversely the
meanings which occur to him are not embodied any longer in the
given world. We shall say, in a word, that the world no longer has any
physiognomy for him.2 This is what reveals the nature of the peculiari¬
ties seen in his drawings. Schneider never draws from the model
(; nachzeichnen ); perception is not carried directly into movement.
With his left hand he feels the object, recognizes certain characteris¬
tics (a corner, a right angle), formulates his discovery and finally
draws without any model a figure corresponding to the verbal
formula.3

The translation of percept into movement is effected via the ex¬
press meanings of language, whereas the normal subject penetrates
into the object by perception, assimilating its structure into his sub¬
stance, and through this body the object directly regulates his move¬
ments.4 This subject-object dialogue, this drawing together, by the
subject, of the meaning diffused through the object, and, by the ob¬
ject, of the subject’s intentions — a process which is physiognomic
perception — arranges round the subject a world which speaks to him
of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world. Since
this function is impaired in Schneider’s case, it is foreseeable that, a
fortiori , perception of human events and other people will show de¬
ficiencies, for these presuppose the same taking up of external by
internal and of internal by external. And indeed if a story is told to
the patient, it is observed that instead of grasping it as a melodic
whole with down and up beats, with its characteristic rhythm or

1 Benary, op. cit., p. 255.

2 Schneider can hear read, or himself read, without recognizing it, a letter
which he has written. He even states that without signature one cannot know
whose a letter is (Hochheimer, op. cit., p. 12).

3 Benary, op. cit., p. 256.

4 It is this appropriation of the ‘motive* in its full sense that Cezanne achieved
after hours of meditation. ‘We are germinating,’ he would say. After which sud¬
denly: ‘Everything would fall into place.’ J. Gasquet, Cezanne , II* Partie, Le
Motif ; pp. 81-3.

132

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

flow, he remembers it only as a succession of facts to be noted one by
one. That is why he can understand it only if pauses are made in the
narrative and used to sum up briefly the gist of what he has so far
been told. When he tells back the story, he never does so according to
the account given to him (nacherzahlen) : he finds nothing to em-
phasize; he can understand the course of the story only as he tells it,
and it is, as it were, reconstituted part by part.1 There is, then, in the
normal subject an essence of the story which emerges as it is told,
without any express analysis, and this subsequently guides along any
reproduction of the narrative. The story for him is a certain human
event, recognizable by its style, and here the subject 4 understands’
because he has the power to live, beyond his immediate experience,
through the events described. Generally speaking, nothing but what
is immediately given is present to the speaker. The thought of others
will never be present to him, since he has no immediate experience of
it2 The words of others are for him signs which have to be severally
deciphered, instead of being, as with the normal subject, the trans¬
parent envelope of a meaning within which he might live. Like events,
words are for the patient not the theme of an act of drawing together
or projecting, but merely the occasion for a methodical interpreta¬
tion. Like the object, other people *telT him nothing, and the phan¬
toms which present themselves to him are devoid, not, it is true, of
that intellectual meaning arrived at through analysis, but that primary
meaning reached through co-existence.

Specifically intellectual disturbances, those of judgement and
meaning — cannot be considered ultimate deficiencies, and must also
be placed in the same existential context. Take, for example, 'number
blindness’.3 It has been possible to demonstrate that the patient,
though able to count, add, subtract, multiply or divide in relation to
the things placed in front of him, cannot conceive number, and that
all his results are obtained by ritual procedures, which have no signi¬
ficant bearing on it. He knows by heart the sequence of numbers and
recites it mentally, while checking off on his fingers the objects to be
counted, added, subtracted, multiplied or divided : 4a number for him
merely belongs to a sequence of numbers, and has no meaning as a
fixed quantity, as a group or a determinate measure.’ 4 Of two numbers

1 Benary, op. cit., p. 279.

2 Of a conversation of importance to him, he recalls only the general theme and
the decision taken at the end of it, but not his interlocutor’s words: ‘I know what
I said in a conversation from the reasons I had for saying it; what the other said is
more difficult because I have nothing to hold on to (Anhalnpmtkt) in order to
remember’ (Benary, op. cit., p. 214). It can be seen, furthermore, that the patient
reconstitutes and infers his own attitude at the time of the conversation, and that
he is incapable of directly ‘taking hold’ even of his own thoughts.

* Benary, op. cit., p. 224. 4 Ibid., p. 223.

133

THE BODY

the greater for him is the one which comes ‘after* in the numerical
series. When he is given 5 + 4 — 4 to work out, he does the sum in
two stages without ‘noticing anything in particular’. He merely
agrees, if it is pointed out to him, that the number 5 ‘remains’. He
fails to understand that ‘twice half’ a given number is the number
itself.1 Are we then to say that he has lost number as a category or
schema? Yet when he runs his eyes over the objects to be counted,
checking each of them on his fingers, even though it often happens
that he confuses objects already counted with those still to come,
even though the synthesis may be vague, he obviously has the notion
of a synthetic operation which is nothing other than numeration.
And conversely, with the normal subject the sequence of numbers as
a kinetic melody practically devoid of genuinely numerical meaning
is most often substituted for the concept of number. Number is never
a pure concept, the absence of which would allow us to define Schnei¬
der’s mental state, it is a structure of consciousness involving degrees
of more or less. The true act of counting requires of the subject that
his operations as they develop and cease to occupy the centre of his
consciousness, shall not cease to be there for him and shall constitute,
for subsequent operations, a ground on which they may be estab¬
lished. Consciousness holds in reserve, behind itself, completed syn¬
theses ; these are still available and might be brought back into action,
and it is on this basis that they are taken up and transcended in the
total act of numeration. What is called pure number or authentic
number is only a development or extension, through repetition, of the
process which constitutes any perception. Schneider’s conception of
number is affected only in so far as it implies, to a great extent, the
power of laying out a past in order to move towards a future. It is
this existential basis of intelligence which is affected, much more than
intelligence itself, for, as we have shown,2 Schneider’s general intel¬
ligence is intact: his replies are slow, never meaningless, but those of
a mature, thinking man who takes an interest in the doctor’s experi¬
ments. Beneath the intelligence as an anonymous function or as a
categorial process, a personal core has to be recognized, which is the
patient’s being, his power of existing. It is here that the illness has its
seat. Schneider would still like to arrive at political or religious
opinions, but knows that it is useless to try. ‘He must now be content
with large-scale beliefs, without the power to express them.’3 He
never sings or whistles of his own accord.4 We shall see later that he
never takes any initiative sexually. He never goes out for a walk, but
always on an errand, and he never recognizes Professor Goldstein’s
house as he passes it ‘because he did not go out with the intention of

1 Benary, op. cit., p. 240. 2 Ibid., p. 284.

3 Ibid., op. cit., p. 213. 4 Hochheimer, op. cit., p. 37.

134

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

going (here’.1 Just as he needs, by means of preparatory movements,
to be able to ‘take a grip’ on his own body before performing move¬
ments when they are not mapped out ahead in a familiar situation, —
so, a conversation with another person does not constitute for him a
situation significant in itself, and requiring extempore replies. He can
speak only in accordance with a plan drawn up in advance: ‘He can¬
not fall back on the inspiration of the moment in order to find the
ideas required in response to a complex stage of the conversation, and
this is true whether it is a question of new or old points of view,’8
There is in his whole conduct something meticulous and serious which
derives from the fact that he is incapable of play-acting. To act is to
place oneself for a moment in an imaginary situation, to find satisfac¬
tion in changing one’s ‘setting’. The patient, on the other hand, can¬
not enter into a fictitious situation without converting it into a real
one: he cannot tell the difference between a riddle and a problem.3 In
his case, the possible situation at every moment is so narrow that two
sectors of the environment not having anything in common for him
cannot simultaneously form a situation.4 If one talks to him he can¬
not hear the sound of another conversation in the next room; if a
dish is brought and placed on the table, he does not stop to wonder
where the dish comes from. He states that one can see only in the
direction in which one is looking, and only objects at which one is
looking.5 Future and past are for him only ‘shrunken’ extensions of the
present. He has lost ‘our power of looking according to the temporal
vector’.® He cannot take a bird’s eye view of his past and unhesitat¬
ingly rediscover it by going from the whole to the parts : he rebuilds it,
starting with a fragment which has kept its meaning and which
provides him with a ‘supporting-point’.7 Since he complains of the
weather, he is asked if he feels better in winter. He replies: ‘I can’t
say now, I can’t say anything at the moment’.8 Thus all Schneider’s
troubles are reducible to a unity, but not the abstract unity of the
‘representative function’: he is ‘tied’ to actuality, he ‘lacrs liberty’,8
that concrete liberty which comprises the general power of putting
oneself into a situation. Beneath intelligence as beneath perception,
we discover a more fundamental function, ‘a vector mobile in all
directions like a searchlight, one through which we can direct our¬
selves towards anything, in or outside ourselves, and display a form

1 Hochheimer, op. cit., p. 56.

* Benary, op. cit., p. 213.

* In ihc same way there are for him no double meanings or puns because words
have only one meaning at a time, and because the actual is entirely without any
horizon of possibilities. Benary, op. cit., p. 283.

4 Hochheimer, op. cit., p. 32. 6 Ibid., pp. 32-33.

6 ‘Uscres Hineinsehen in den Zeitvektor’, ibid. 7 Benary, op. cit., p. 213.

8 Hochheimer. op. cit., p. 33. * Ibid., p. 32.

135

THE BODY

of behaviour in relation to that object’.1 Yet the analogy of the search¬
light is inadequate, since it presupposes given objects on to which the
beam plays, whereas the nuclear function to which we refer, before
bringing objects to our sight or knowledge, makes them exist in a
more intimate sense, for us. Let us therefore say rather, borrowing
a term from other works,2 that the life of consciousness — cognitive
life, the life of desire or perceptual life — is subtended by an ‘inten¬
tional arc’ which projects round about us our past, our future, our
human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or
rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is
this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses, of in¬
telligence, of sensibility and motility. And it is this which ‘goes limp’
in illness.

The study of a pathological case, then, has enabled us to glimpse
a new mode of analysis — existential analysis — which goes beyond
the traditional alternatives of empiricism and rationalism, of explana¬
tion and introspection. If consciousness were a collection of mental
facts each disturbance should be elective. If it were a ‘representative
function’, a pure power of signification, it could be or not be (and
with it everything else), but it could not cease to be having once been,
or become sick, that is, deteriorate. If, in short, it is a projective
activity, which leaves objects all round it, like traces of its own acts,
but which nevertheless uses them as springboards from which to leap
towards other spontaneous acts, then it becomes understandable that
any ‘content’ deficiency should have its repercussions on the main
body of experience and open the door to its disintegration, that any
pathological degeneration should affect the whole of consciousness —
and that nevertheless the derangement should on each occasion attack
a certain ‘side’ of consciousness, that in each case certain symptoms
should dominate the clinical picture of the disease, and, in short, that
consciousness should be vulnerable and able to receive the illness into
itself. In attacking the ‘visual sphere’, illness is not limited to destroy¬
ing certain contents of consciousness, ‘visual representations’ or sight
literally speaking; it affects sight in the figurative sense, of which the
former is no more than the model or symbol — the power of ‘looking
down upon’ (uberschauen) simultaneous multiplicities,3 a certain way
of positing the object or being aware. However, as this type of con¬
sciousness is only the sublimation of sensory vision, as it is schema¬
tized constantly within the dimensions of the visual field, albeit en¬
dowing them with a new meaning, it will be realized that this general
function has its psychological roots. Consciousness freely develops

1 Hochheimer, op. cit., p. 69.

2 Cf. Fischer, Raum-Zeitstruktur and Denkstonmg in der Schizophrenie, p. 250.

3 Cf. La Structure du Comportement , pp., 91 and ff.

136

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

its visual data beyond their own specific significance; it uses them for
the expression of its spontaneous acts, as semantic evolution clearly
shows in loading the terms intuition, self-evidence and natural light
with increasingly rich meaning. But conversely, not one of these
terms, in the final sense which history has given them, is understand¬
able without reference to the structures of visual perception. Hence
one cannot say that man sees because he is Mind, nor indeed that he
is Mind because he sees: to see as a man sees and to be Mind are
synonymous. In so far as consciousness is consciousness of something
only by allowing its furrow to trail behind it, and in so far as, in order
to conceive an object one must rely on a previously constructed
world of thought*, there is always some degree of depersonalization
at the heart of consciousness. Hence the principle of an intervention
from outside: consciousness may be ailing, the world of its thoughts
may collapse into fragments,— or rather, as the ‘contents’ dissociated
by the illness did not appear in the role of parts in normal conscious¬
ness and served only as stepping-stones to significances which outstrip
them, consciousness can be seen trying to hold up its superstructures
when their foundations have given way, aping its everyday processes,
but without being able to come by any intuitive realization, and with¬
out being able to conceal the particular deficiency which robs them
of their complete significance. It is in the same way theoretically un¬
derstandable that mental illness may, in its turn, be Jinked with some
bodily accident; consciousness projects itself into a physical world
and has a body, as it projects itself into a cultural world and has its
habits: because it cannot be consciousness without playing upon
significances given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own
personal past, and because any form of lived experience tends to¬
wards a certain generality whether that of our habits or that of our
‘bodily functions*.

1 hese elucidations enable us clearly to understand motility as basic
mtentionality. Consciousness Is in the first place not a matter of 'l
think that* but of *1 can\J Schneider’s motor trouble cannot, any
more than his visual deficiency, be reduced to any failure of the
general function of representation. Sight and movement are specific
ways of entering into relationship with objects and if, through all
these experiences, some unique function finds its expression, it is the
momentum of existence, which does not cancel out l he radical diver¬
sity of contents, because it links them to each other, not by placing
them all under the control of an *1 think’, but by guiding them to¬
wards the intersensory unity of a ‘world*. Movement is not thought
about movement, and bodily space is not space thought of or repre¬
sented. ‘Each voluntary movement takes place in a setting, against a
1 This term is the usual one in Husserl’s unpublished writings.

137

THU BODY

background which is determined by the movement itself. . . . We per¬
form our movements in a space which is not “empty” or unrelated to

them, but which on the contrary, bears a highly determinate relation
to them: movement and background are, in fact, only artificially
separated stages of a unique totality.51 In the action of the hand
which is raised towards an object is contained a reference to the
object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific tiling
towards which we project ourselves, near which we are, in anticipa¬
tion, and which we haunt.2 Consciousness is being towards the thing

* Goldstein, Ober die Abhangigkeitt p. 163,

* It is not easy tp reveal pure motor intent tonality: it is concealed behind the
objective world which it helps to build up. The history or apraxia would show
how the description of Praxis is almost always contaminated and finally made
impossible by the notion of representation, Liepmann ( Ober Stomigm des
Handeins bei Gehirnkrmtkmt) draws a dear distinction between apraxia and
agnosic disturbances of conduct, in which the object is not recognized, but in
which, however, conduct is in harmony with the representation of the object, and
generally between apraxia and disturbances affecting the 'ideational preparation
of action' (forgetting the aim, confusing two aims, premature performance, trans¬
fer of the aim through some intrusive perception) (op. tit., pp. 20-31). With Licp-
rnann’s subject (the 'counsellor of state'), the ideational process is normal, since
the subject can perform with his left hand everything that he is prevented from per¬
forming with his right. Moreover, the hand is not paralysed. The case of the coun¬
sellor of state shows that between the so-cal led higher mental processes and motor
nerve- impulses there Is room for another deficiency which prevents any applica¬
tion of the project {Entwurf) for action to the motility of one particular limb . . .
The whole sensory-motor apparatus of a limb is so to speak dislocated (exart te
cuttert) in relation to the whole physiological process (ibid,, pp. 40-1), Normally,

then, every formula of movement, while offering us a representation, presents
itself to our body as a spec i fie practical possibility. The patient has retained the
formula of movement as a representation, but it no longer conveys anything to
his right hand, or at any rate his right hand has no longer any sphere of action.’
‘He has retained everything communicable in an action, everything objective and
perceptible in it for others. What he lacks, namely his capacity to move his right
hand according to a plan already mapped out, is something incommunicable and
incapable of being an object for an outside consciousness; it is a power, not a
thing known (cm Konnen, kein Kennedy (ibid., p. 47). But when Liepmann tries to
make his analysis more explicit, he returns to traditional views and dissects move¬
ment into a representation (the 'formula of movement1 which, along with the
main goal provides me with intermediate aims) and a system of automatisms
(which, for each intermediate aim, brings appropriate nerve impulses into play)
(ibid., p. 59), The 'power' earlier mentioned becomes a 'property of the nervous
substance’ (ibid., p. 47). This brings us back to the dualism of consciousness and
body which we thought we had left behind when we introduced the notion of
Bewgurmetiiwurf or motor project. If it is a question of a simple action, the
representation of the goal and of the intermediate aims is transformed into move¬
ment because it releases involuntary actions acquired once and for all (p. 55). If
it is a matter of complex action, it calls up the ‘kmaesthetic memory of the com¬
ponent movements: as movement is composed of partial acts, the project of
movement is composed of the representation of its parts or of the intermediate
aims: it is this representation that we have called the formula of movement’ (p.

138

THE SPATIAL1TY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when
the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into
its ‘world*, and to move one's body is to aim at things through it; it
is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it in¬
dependently of any representation. Motility, then, is not, as it were,
a handmaid of consciousness, transporting the body to that point in
space of which we have formed a representation beforehand. In order
that we may be able to move our body towards an object, the object
must first exist for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the
‘in-itself’. Objects no longer exist for the arm of the apraxic, and this
is what causes it to remain immobile. Cases of pure apraxia in which
the perception of space remains unaffected, in which even the ‘intel¬
lectual notion of the gesture to be made' does not appear to be
obscured, and yet in which the patient cannot copy a triangle;1 cases
of constructive apraxia, in which the subject shows no gnosic dis¬
turbance except as regards the localization of stimuli on his body,
and yet is incapable of copying a cross, a v or an all prove that
the body has its world and that objects or space may be present to
our knowledge but not to our body.

We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in
time. It inhabits space and time. If my hand traces a complicated path

57). Praxis is torn asunder by representations and automatic actions. The case of
the counsellor of state becomes unintelligible, since it becomes necessary to relate
his troubles either to the ideational preliminaries to movement, or else to some
deficiency of the automatic actions, which Licpmann ruled out from the start. So
motor apraxia comes down either to ideational apraxia, which is a form of
agnosia, or else to paralysis. We shall make sense of apraxia and do justice to
Liepmann’s observations only if the movement to be performed can be antici¬
pated, though not by a representation. This is possible only provided that con¬
sciousness is understood not as the explicit positing of its objects, but more
generally as reference to a practical as well as a theoretical object, as being in the
world P and if the body Tor its part is understood not as one object among all
objects, but as the vehicle of being in the world. As long as consciousness is under¬
stood as representation, the only possible operation for h is to form representa¬
tions. Consciousness will be motor as long as it furnishes itself with a ‘representa¬
tion of movement*. The body then executes the movement by copying it from the
representation which consciousness presents to itself, and in accordance with a
formula of movement which it receives from that representation. (Cf. O. Siltig,
Ober Apraxic, p. 93.) We still need to understand by what magical process the
representation of a movement causes precisely that movement to be made by the
body. The problem can be solved only provided that we cease to draw a distinction
between the body as a mechanism in itself and consciousness as being for itself.

1 Lhermitte, G, lAvy and Kyriako, Les Perturbations de la representation
spatiale chez les apraxiquest p. 597.

a Lhermitte and Trelles, Sur P apraxic constructive* les troubles de la pensee
spatiale ct de la somatognosie datisTapraxie , p. 423. Cf. Lhermitte, de Massary and
Kyriako, Le RSfe de la pensde spatiale dans I'apraxie*

L 139

TIIF BODY

through the air, I do not need, in order to know its final position, to
add together all movements made in the same direction and subtract
those made in the opposite direction. ‘Every identifiable change
reaches consciousness already loaded with its relations to what has
preceded it, as on a taximeter the distance is given already converted
into shillings and pence.1 At every moment, previous attitudes and
movements provide an ever ready standard of measurement. It is not
a question of a visual or motor ‘memory’ of the starting position of
the hand : cerebral lesions may leave visual memory intact while de¬
stroying awareness of movement. As for the ‘motor memory’, it is
clear that it could hardly establish the present position of the hand,
unless the perception which gave rise to it had not, stored up in it, an
absolute awareness of ‘here’, for without this we should be thrown
back from memory to memory and never have a present perception.
Just as it is necessarily ‘here’, the body necessarily exists ‘now’; it can
never become ‘past’, and if we cannot retain in health the living
memory of sickness, or, in adult life that of our body as a child, these
‘gaps in memory’ merely express the temporal structure of our body.
At each successive instant of a movement, the preceding instant is not
lost sight of. It is, as it were, dovetailed into the present, and present
perception generally speaking consists in drawing together, on the
basis of one’s present position, the succession of previous positions,
which envelop each other. But the impending position is also covered
by the present, and through it all those which will occur throughout
the movement. Each instant of the movement embraces its whole
span, and particularly the first which, being the active initiative, in¬
stitutes the link between a here and a yonder, a now and a future
which the remainder of the instants will merely develop. In so far as I
have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not,
for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number
of relations synthesized by my consciousness, and into which it
draws my body. I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space
and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and in¬
cludes them. The scope of this inclusion is the measure of that of my
existence ; but in any case it can never be all-embracing. The space and
time which I inhabit are always in their different ways indeterminate
horizons which contain other points of view. The synthesis of both
time and space is a task that always has to be performed afresh. Our
bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge;
it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with
a ‘praktognosia’,2 which has to be recognized as original and perhaps
as primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without

1 Head and Holmes, Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesions , p. 1 87.

2 Griinbaum, Aphasie und Motorik.

140

THE SPATIALTTY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

having to make use of my ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’. Cer¬
tain patients can imitate the doctor’s movements and move their right
hand to their right ear and their left to their nose, so long as they
stand beside the doctor and follow his movements through a mirror,
but not if they face him. Head explained the patient’s failure in terms
of the inadequacy of his ‘formulation’ : according to him the imita¬
tion of the action is dependent upon a verbal translation. In fact, the
formulation may be correct although the imitation is unsuccessful, or
again the imitation may be successful without any formulation.
Writers on the subject1 then introduce, if not exactly verbal symbol¬
ism, at least a general symbolic function, an ability to ‘transpose’, in
which imitation, like perception or objective thought, is merely a
particular case. But it is obvious that this general function does not
explain adapted action. For patients are capable, not only of formu¬
lating the action to be performed, but of picturing it to themselves.
They are quite aware of what they have to do, and yet, instead of
moving the right hand to the right ear and the left hand to the nose,
they touch one ear with both hands, or else their nose and one eye, or
one ear and one eye.2 What has become impossible is the application
and adaptation to their own body of the objective particularity of the
action. In other words, the right and left hand, the eye and ear are
still presented to them as absolute locations, and not inserted into
any system of correlations which links them up with the correspond¬
ing parts of the doctor’s body, and which makes them usable for
imitation, even when the doctor is face to face with the patient. In
order to imitate the actions of someone facing me, it is not necessary
that I should know expressly that ‘the hand which appears on the
right side of my visual field is for my partner the left one’. Now it is
precisely the victim of disturbances who has recourse to these ex¬
planations. In normal imitation, the subject’s left hand is immediately
identified with his partner’s, his action immediately models itself on
- the other’s, and the subject projects himself or loses his separate
reality in the other, becomes identified with him, and the change of
co-ordinates is pre-eminently embodied in this existential process.
This is because the normal subject has his body not only as a system
of present positions, but besides, and thereby, as an open system of
an infinite number of equivalent positions directed to other ends.
What we have called the body image is precisely this system of equi¬
valents, this immediately given invariant whereby the different motor
tasks are instantaneously transferable. It follows that it is not only an
experience of my body, but an experience of my body in the world,
and that this is what gives a motor meaning to verbal orders. The

1 Goldstein, Van Woerkom, Bouman and Griinbaum,

2 Griinbaum, op, cit., pp. 386-92.

141

THE BODY

function destroyed in apraxic disturbances is therefore a motor one.

‘It is not the symbolic or sense-giving function in general which is
affected in cases of this kind : it is a much more primary function, in
its nature motor, in other words, the capacity for motor differentia¬
tion within the dynamic body image’.1 The space in which normal
imitation operates is not, as opposed to concrete space with its abso¬
lute locations, an ‘objective space’ or a ‘representative space’ based on
an act of thought. It is already built into my bodily structure, and is
its inseparable correlative. ‘Already motility, in its pure state, pos¬
sesses the basic power of giving a meaning ( Sinngebung )’.2 Even if
subsequently, thought and the perception of space are freed from
motility and spatial being, for us to be able to conceive space, it is in
the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our
body, and that it should have provided us with the first model of
those transpositions, equivalents and identifications which make
space into an objective system and allow our experience to be one of
objects, opening out on an ‘in itself’. ‘Motility is the primary sphere
in which initially the meaning of all significances (der Sinn alter
Signifikationen) is engendered in the domain of represented space.’3

The cultivation of habit as a rearrangement and renewal of the
body image presents great difficulties to traditional philosophies,
which are always inclined to conceive synthesis as intellectual syn¬
thesis. It is quite true that what brings together, in habit, component
actions, reactions and ‘stimuli’ is not some external process of asso¬
ciation.4 Any mechanistic theory runs up against the fact that the
learning process is systematic: the subject does not weld together
individual movements and individual stimuli but acquires the power
to respond with a certain type of solution to situations of a certain
general form. The situations may differ widely from case to case, and
the response movements may be entrusted sometimes to one opera¬
tive organ, sometimes to another, both situations and responses in
the various cases having in common not so much a partial identity 11
of elements as a shared significance. Must we then see the origin of
habit in an act of understanding which organizes the elements only
to withdraw subsequently?6 For example, is it not the case that
forming the habit of dancing is discovering, by analysis, the formula
of the movement in question, and then reconstructing it on the basis
of the ideal outline by the use of previously acquired movements,
those of walking and running? But before the formula of the new
dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must

1 Griinbaum, op. cit., pp. 397-98. 2 Ibid., p. 394. 2 Ibid., p. 396.

4 See, on this point. La Structure du Comportement , pp. 125 and ff.

B As Bergson, for example, thinks when he defines habit as ‘the fossilized
residue of a spiritual activity*.

142

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it. As has
often been said, it is the body which ‘catches’ (kapieri) and ‘compre¬
hends’ movement. The cultivation of habit is indeed the grasping of
a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance.
Now what precisely does this mean? A woman may, without any cal¬
culation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and
things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as
we feel where our hand is.1 If I am in the habit of driving a car, I
enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without com¬
paring the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go
through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway
against that of my body.2 The hat and the car have ceased to be ob¬
jects with a size and volume which is established by comparison with
other objects. They have become potentialities of volume, the demand
for a certain amount of free space. In the same way the iron gate to
the Underground platform, and the road, have become restrictive
potentialities and immediately appear passable or impassable for my
body with its adjuncts. The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an
object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has be¬
come an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of
touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things,
the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the
blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than
of the position of objects through it. The position of things is im¬
mediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to
it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of
action. If I want to get used to a stick, I try it by touching a few
things with it, and eventually I have it ‘well in hand’, I can see what
things are ‘within reach’ or out of reach of my stick. There is no ques¬
tion here of any quick estimate or any comparison between the objec¬
tive length of the stick and the objective distance away of the goal to
be reached. The points in space do not stand out as objective posi¬
tions in relation to the objective position occupied by our body; they
mark, in our vicinity, the varying range of our aims and our gestures.
To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them,
or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.
Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or
changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.3 It is

1 Head, Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesiony p. 188.

2 Griinbaum, Aphasie und Motorik, p. 395.

3 It thus elucidates the nature of the body image. When we say that it presents
us immediately with our bodily position, we do not mean, after the manner of
empiricists, that it consists of a mosaic of ‘extensive sensations'. It is a system
which is open on to the world, and correlative with it.

143

THE BODY

possible to know how to type without being able to say where the
letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys.
To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter
among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for
each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our
eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action,
what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming
only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in
detachment from that effort. The subject knows where the letters are
on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is, through a
knowledge bred of familiarity which does not give us a position in
objective space. The movement of her fingers is not presented to the
typist as a path through space which can be described, but merely as
a certain adjustment of motility, physiognomically distinguishable
from any other. The question is often framed as if the perception of
a letter written on paper aroused the representation of the same letter
which in turn aroused the representation of the movement needed to
strike it on the machine. But this is mythological language. When I
run my eyes over the text set before me, there do not occur percep¬
tions which stir up representations, but patterns are formed as I look,
and these are endowed with a typical or familiar physiognomy. When
I sit at my typewriter, a motor space opens up beneath my hands, in
which I am about to ‘play’ what I have read. The reading of the word
is a modulation of visible space, the performance of the movement is
a modulation of manual space, and the whole question is how a cer-
tin physiognomy of ‘visual’ patterns can evoke a certain type of motor
response, how each ‘visual’ structure eventually provides itself with
its mobile essence without there being any need to spell the word or
specify the movement in detail in order to translate one into the other.-
But this power of habit is no different from the general one which we
exercise over our body : if I am ordered to touch my ear or my knee,
I move my hand to my ear or my knee by the shortest route, without
having to think of the initial position of my hand, or that of my ear, or
the path between them. We said earlier that it is the body which ‘un¬
derstands’ in the cultivation of habit. This way of putting it will ap¬
pear absurd, if understanding is subsuming a sense-datum under an
idea, and if the body is an object. But the phenomenon of habit is
just what prompts us to revise our notion of ‘understand’ and our
notion of the body. To understand is to experience the harmony be¬
tween what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the
performance — and the body is our anchorage in a world. When I put
my hand to my knee, I experience at every stage of the movement the
fulfilment of an intention which was not directed at my knee as an
idea or even as an object, but as a present and real part of my living

144

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

body, that is, finally, as a stage in my perpetual movement towards a
world. When the typist performs the necessary movements on the
typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the
intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally
true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank
space into his bodily space.

The example of instrumentalists shows even better how habit has
its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body
as mediator of a world. It is known1 that an experienced organist is
capable of playing an organ which he does not know, which has more
or fewer manuals, and stops differently arranged, compared with
those on the instrument he is used to playing. He needs only an hour’s
practice to be ready to perform his programme. Such a short pre¬
paration rules out the supposition that new conditioned reflexes have
here been substituted for the existing sets, except where both form a
system and the change is all-embracing, which takes us away from
the mechanistic theory, since in that case the reactions are mediated
by a comprehensive grasp of the instrument. Are we to maintain that
the organist analyses the organ, that he conjures up and retains a
representation of the stops, pedals and manuals and their relation to
each other in space? But during the short rehearsal preceding the
concert, he does not act like a person about to draw up a plan. He
sits on the seat, works the pedals, pulls out the stops, gets the measure
of the instrument with his body, incorporates within himself the rele¬
vant directions and dimensions, settles into the organ as one settles
into a house. He does not learn objective spatial positions for each
stop and pedal, nor does he commit them to ‘memory’. During the
rehearsal, as during the performance, the stops, pedals and manuals
are given to him as nothing more than possibilities of achieving cer¬
tain emotional or musical values, and their positions are simply the
places through which this value appears in the world. Between the
musical essence of the piece as it is shown in the score and the notes
which actually sound round the organ, so direct a relation is estab¬
lished that the organist’s body and his instrument are merely the
medium of this relationship. Henceforth the music exists by itself and
through it all the rest exists.2 There is here no place for any ‘memory’
of the position of the stops, and it is not in objective space that the
organist in fact is playing. In reality his movements during rehearsal

1 Cf. Chevalier, V Habitude, pp. 202 and ff.

3 ‘As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as
performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear.’
(Proust, Swanns Way , II, trails. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, p. 180.)

‘Its cries were so sudden that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race
to catch them as they came.’ (Ibid., p. 186.)

145

THE BODY

are consecratory gestures; they draw affective vectors, discover emo¬
tional sources, and create a space of expressiveness as the movements
of the augur delimit the templum .

The whole problem of habit here is one of knowing how the musical
significance of an action can be concentrated in a certain place to the
extent that, in giving himself entirely to the music, the organist
reaches for precisely those stops and pedals which are to bring it into
being. Now the body is essentially an expressive space. If I want to
take hold of an object, already, at a point of space about which I
have been quite unmindful, this power of grasping constituted by my
hand moves upwards towards the thing. I move my legs not as things
in space two and a half feet from my head, but as a power of loco¬
motion which extends my motor intention downwards. The main
areas of my body are devoted to actions, and participate in their
value, and asking why common sense makes the head the seat of
thought raises the same problem as asking how the organist distri¬
butes, through ‘organ space’, musical significances. But our body is
not merely one expressive space among the rest, for that is simply the
constituted body. It is the origin of the rest, expressive movement it¬
self, that which causes them to begin to exist as things, under our
hands and eyes. Although our body does not impose definite in¬
stincts upon us from birth, as it does upon animals, it does at least
give to our life the form of generality, and develops our personal acts
into stable dispositional tendencies. In this sense our nature is not
long-established custom, since custom presupposes the form of pas¬
sivity derived from nature. The body is our general medium for hav¬
ing a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the
conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological
world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and
moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through
them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits such as
dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved
by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument,
and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. At all levels it
performs the same function which is to endow the instantaneous ex¬
pressions of spontaneity with ‘a little renewable action and indepen¬
dent existence’.1 Habit is merely a form of this fundamental power.
We say that the body has understood, and habit has been cultivated
when it has absorbed a new meaning, and assimilated a fresh core of
significance.

To sum up, what we have discovered through the study of motility,
is a new meaning of the word ‘meaning’. The great strength of intel-
lectualist psychology and idealist philosophy comes from their having
1 Valery, Introduction a la Methode de Leonard de Vinci , Varidte , p. 177.

146

THE SPATIALITY OF ONE’S OWN BODY AND MOTILITY

no difficulty in showing that perception and thought have an intrinsic
significance and cannot be explained in terms of the external associa¬
tion of fortuitously agglomerated contents. The Cogito was the com¬
ing to self-awareness of this inner core. But all meaning was ipso facto
conceived as an act of thought, as the work of a pure /, and although
rationalism easily refuted empiricism, it was itself unable to account
for the variety of experience, for the element of senselessness in it, for
the contingency of contents. Bodily experience forces us to acknow¬
ledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a universal
constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain con¬
tents. My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general
function, and which nevertheless exists, and is susceptible to disease.
In it we learn to know that union of essence and existence which we
shall find again in perception generally, and which we shall then have
to describe more fully.

147

THE SYNTHESIS OF ONE’S
OWN BODY

THE analysis of bodily space has led us to results which may be
generalized. We notice for the first time, with regard to our own
body, what is true of all perceived things : that the perception of space
and the perception of the thing, the spatiality of the thing and its
being as a thing are not two distinct problems. The Cartesian and
Kantian tradition already teaches us this; it makes the object’s spatial
limits its essence; it shows in existence partes extra partes , and in
spatial distribution, the only possible significance of existence in itself.
But it elucidates the perception of the object through the perception
of space, whereas the experience of our own body teaches us to
realize space as rooted in existence. Intellectualism clearly sees that
the ‘motive of the thing’ and ‘the motive of space’1 are interwoven,
but reduces the former to the latter. Experience discloses beneath
objective space, in which the body eventually finds its place, a primi¬
tive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer covering and
which merges with the body’s very being. To be a body, is to be tied
to a certain world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in
space: it is of it. Anosognosics who describe their arm as Tike a
snake’, long and cold,2 do not, strictly speaking, fail to recognize its
objective outline and, even when the patient looks unsuccessfully for
his arm or fastens it in order not to lose it,3 he knows well enough
where his arm is, since that is where he looks for it and fastens it. If,
however, patients experience their arm’s space as something alien, if
generally speaking I can feel my body’s space as vast or minute de¬
spite the evidence of my senses, this is because there exists an affective
presence and enlargement for which objective spatiality is not a suffi-

1 Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formerly III, Second Part, Chap. II.

2 Lhermitte, V Image de notre corps , p. 130.

3 Van Bogaert, Sur la Pathologie de V Image de soi, p. 541.

148

THE SYNTHESIS OF ONE’S OWN BODY

cient condition, as anosognosia shows, and indeed not even a neces¬
sary condition, as is shown by the phantom arm. Bodily spatiality is
the deployment of one’s bodily being, the way in which the body
comes into being as a body. In trying to analyse it, we were therefore
simply anticipating what we have to say about bodily synthesis in
general.

We find in the unity of the body the same implicatory structure as
we have already described in discussing space. The various parts of
my body, its visual, tactile and motor aspects are not simply co¬
ordinated. If I am sitting at my table and I want to reach the tele¬
phone, the movement of my hand towards it, the straightening of the
upper part of the body, the tautening of the leg muscles are super¬
imposed on each other. I desire a certain result and the relevant tasks
are spontaneously distributed amongst the appropriate segments, the
possible combinations being presented in advance as equivalent: I
can continue leaning back in my chair provided that I stretch my arm
further, or lean forward, or even partly stand up. All these move¬
ments are available to us in virtue of their common meaning. That
is why, in their first attempts at grasping, children look, not at their
hand, but at the object: the various parts of the body are known to
us through their functional value only, and their co-ordination is not
learnt. Similarly, when I am sitting at my table, I can instantly visual¬
ize the parts of my body which are hidden from me. As I contract my
foot in my shoe, I can see it. This power belongs to me even with
respect to parts of the body which I have never seen. Thus certain
patients have the hallucination of their own face seen from inside}
It has been possible to show that we do not recognize our own hand
in a photograph, and that many subjects are even uncertain about
identifying their own handwriting among others, and yet that every¬
one recognizes his own silhouette or his own walk when it is filmed.
Thus we do not recognize the appearance of what we have often seen,
and on the other hand we immediately recognize the visual repre¬
sentation of what is invisible to us in our own body.2 In heautoscopy
the double which the subject sees in front of him is not always re¬
cognized by certain visible details, yet he feels convinced that it is
himself, and consequently declares that he sees his double.3 Each of
us sees himself as it were through an inner eye which from a few
yards away is looking at us from the head to the knees.4 Thus the
connecting link between the parts of our body and that between our

1 Lhermitte, V Image de notre corps , p. 238.

2 Wolff, Selbstbeurteilung und Fremdbeurteilung in wissentlichen und unwissent-
lichen Versuch.

3 Menninger-Lerchental, Das Truggebilde der eigenen Gestalt , p. 4.

4 Lhermitte, V Image de notre corps , p. 238.

149

THE BODY

visual and tactile experience are not forged gradually and cumula¬
tively. I do not translate the ‘data of touch into the language of see¬
ing’ or vice versa — I do not bring together one by one the parts of my
body; this translation and this unification are performed once and
for all within me: they are my body itself. Are we then to say that we
perceive our body in virtue of its law of construction, as we know in
advance all the possible facets of a cube in virtue of its geometrical
structure? But — to say nothing at this stage about external objects —
our own body acquaints us with a species of unity which is not a
matter of subsumption under a law. In so far as it stands before me
and presents its systematic variations to the observer, the external
object lends itself to a cursory mental examination of its elements and
it may, at least by way of preliminary approximation, be defined in
terms of the law of their variation. But I am not in front of my body,
I am in it, or rather I am it. Neither its variations nor their constant
can, therefore, be expressly posited. We do not merely behold as
spectators the relations between the parts of our body, and the cor¬
relations between the visual and tactile body: we are ourselves the
unifier of these arms and legs, the person who both sees and touches
them. The body is, to use Leibnitz’s term, the ‘effective law’ of its
changes. If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the per¬
ception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.
Here the ‘visual data’ make their appearance only through the sense
of touch, tactile data through sight, each localized movement against
a background of some inclusive position, each bodily event, whatever
the ‘analyser’ which reveals it, against a background of significance
in which its remotest repercussions are at least foreshadowed and the
possibility of an intersensory parity immediately furnished. What
unites ‘tactile sensations’ in the hand and links them to visual per¬
ceptions of the same hand, and to perceptions of other bodily areas,
is a certain style informing my manual gestures and implying in turn
a certain style of finger movements, and contributing, in the last
resort, to a certain bodily bearing.1 The body is to be compared, not
to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. In a picture or a
piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the
display of colours and sounds. Any analysis of Cezanne’s work, if I
have not seen his pictures, leaves me with a choice between several
possible Cezannes, and it is the sight of the pictures which provides
me with the only existing Cezanne, and therein the analyses find their
full meaning. The same is true of a poem or a novel, although they
are made up of words. It is well known that a poem, though it has a

1 The mechanics of the skeleton cannot, even at the scientific level, account for
the distinctive positions and movements of my body. Cf. La Structure du Com -
portement, p. 196.

THE SYNTHESIS OF ONE’S OWN BODY

superficial meaning translatable into prose, leads, in the reader’s
mind, a further existence which makes it a poem. Just as the spoken
word is significant not only through the medium of individual words,
but also through that of accent, intonation, gesture and facial expres¬
sion, and as these additional meanings no longer reveal the speaker’s
thoughts but the source of his thoughts and his fundamental manner
of being, so poetry, which is perhaps accidentally narrative and in
that way informative, is essentially a variety of existence. It is dis¬
tinguishable from the cry, because the cry makes use of the body as
nature gave it to us: poor in expressive means; whereas the poem
uses language, and even a particular language, in such a way that the
existential modulation, instead of being dissipated at the very instant
of its expression, finds in poetic art a means of making itself eternal.
But although it is independent of the gesture which is inseparable
from living expression, the poem is not independent of every material
aid, and it would be irrecoverably lost if its text were not preserved
down to the last detail. Its meaning is not arbitrary and does not
dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the words printed on
some perishable page. In that sense, like every work of art, the poem
exists as a thing and does not eternally survive as does a truth. As for
the novel, although its plot can be summarized and the ‘thought’ of
the writer lends itself to abstract expression, this conceptual signifi¬
cance is extracted from a wider one, as the description of a person is
extracted from the actual appearance of his face. The novelist’s task
is not to expound ideas or even analyse characters, but to depict an
inter-human event, ripening and bursting it upon us with no ideo¬
logical commentary, to such an extent that any change in the order
of the narrative or in choice of viewpoint would alter the literary
meaning of the event. A novel, poem, picture or musical work are
individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguish¬
able from the thing expressed, their meaning, accessible only through
direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and
spatial situation. It is in this sense that our body is comparable to
a work of art. It is a focal point of living meanings, not the
function of a certain number of mutually variable terms. A certain
experience of touch felt in the upper arm signifies a certain feeling
in the forearm and shoulder along with a certain appearance of
the same arm, not because the various tactile perceptions among
themselves, or the tactile and visual ones, are all involved in one
intelligible arm, as the different facets of a cube are related to the
idea of a cube, but because the arm seen and the arm touched, like
the different segments of the arm, together perform one and the same
action.

Just as we saw earlier that motor habit threw light on the particular

151

THE BODY

nature of bodily space, so here habit in general enables us to under¬
stand the general synthesis of one’s own body. And, just as the analy¬
sis of bodily spatiality foreshadowed that of the unity of one’s own
body, so we may extend to all habits what we have said about motor
ones. In fact every habit is both motor and perceptual, because it lies,
as we have said, between explicit perception and actual movement, in
the basic function which sets boundaries to our field of vision and our
field of action. Learning to find one’s way among things with a stick,
which we gave a little earlier as an example of motor habit, is equally
an example of perceptual habit. Once the stick has become a familiar
instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not
at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. One is
tempted to say that through the sensations produced by the pressure
of the stick on the hand, the blind man builds up the stick along with
its various positions, and that the latter then mediate a second order
object, the external thing. It would appear in this case that perception
is always a reading off from the same sense-data, but constantly
accelerated, and operating with ever more attenuated signals. But
habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the
hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as
signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing
so. The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the
stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instru¬
ment with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of
the bodily synthesis. Correspondingly, the external object is not the
flat projection or invariant of a set of perspectives, but something to¬
wards which the stick leads us, and the perspectives of which, accord¬
ing to perceptual evidence, are not signs, but aspects. Intellectualism
cannot conceive any passage from the perspective to the thing itself,
or from sign to significance otherwise than as an interpretation, an
apperception, a cognitive intention. According to this view sense-data
and perspectives are at each level contents grasped as (aufgefasst als)
manifestations of one and the same intelligible core.1 But this analysis
distorts both the sign and the meaning; it separates out, by a process
of objectification of both, the sense-content, which is already ‘preg¬
nant’ with a meaning, and the invariant core, which is not a law but
a thing: it conceals the organic relationship between subject and
world, the active transcendence of consciousness, the momentum

1 Husserl, for example, for a long time defined consciousness or the imposition
of a significance in terms of the A uffassung-Inhalt framework, and as a beseelende
Auffassung. He takes a decisive step forward in recognizing, from the time of his
Lectures on Time , that this operation presupposes another deeper one whereby
the content is itself made ready for this apprehension. ‘Not every constitution is
brought about through the Auffassungsinhalt- Auffassung' Vorlesungen zur Phdno -
menologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, p. 5, note 1 .

THE SYNTHESIS OF ONE’S OWN BODY

which carries it into a thing and into a world by means of its organs
and instruments. The analysis of motor habit, as an extension of
existence leads on, then, to an analysis of perceptual habit as the
coming into possession of a world. Conversely, every perceptual
habit is still a motor habit and here equally the process of grasping
a meaning is performed by the body. When a child grows accustomed
to distinguishing blue from red, it is observed that the habit cultivated
in relation to these two colours helps with the rest.1 Is it, then, the
case that through the pair blue-red the child has perceived the mean¬
ing: ‘colour’ ? Is the crucial moment of habit-formation in that com¬
ing to awareness, that arrival at a ‘point of view of colour’, that in¬
tellectual analysis which subsumes the data under one category ? But
for the child to be able to perceive blue and red under the category of
colour, the category must be rooted in the data, otherwise no sub¬
sumption could recognize it in them. It is necessary that, on the
‘blue’ and ‘red’ panels presented to him, the particular kind of vibra¬
tion and impression on the eye known as blue and red should be
represented. In the gaze we have at our disposal a natural instrument
analogous to the blind man’s stick. The gaze gets more or less from
things according to the way in which it questions them, ranges over
or dwells on them. To learn to see colours is to acquire a certain style
of seeing, a new use of one’s own body; it is to enrich and recast the
body image. Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our
body is not an object for an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived-through
meanings which moves towards its equilibrium. Sometimes a new
cluster of meanings is formed: our former movements are integrated
into a fresh motor entity, the first visual data into a fresh sensory
entity, our natural powers suddenly come together in a richer mean¬
ing, which hitherto has been merely foreshadowed in our perceptual
or practical field, and which has made itself felt in our experience by
no more than a certain lack, and which by its coming suddenly re¬
shuffles the elements of our equilibrium and fulfils our blind expecta¬
tion.

1 Koffka, Growth of the Mind , pp. 174 and ff.

153

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL
BEING

OUR constant aim is to elucidate the primary function whereby we
bring into existence, for ourselves, or take a hold upon, space, the
object or the instrument, and to describe the body as the place where
this appropriation occurs. Now so long as we considered space or the
things perceived, it was not easy to rediscover the relationship be¬
tween the embodied subject and its world, because it is transformed
by its own activity into the intercourse between the epistemological
subject and the object. Indeed the natural world presents itself as
existing in itself over and above its existence for me; the act of trans¬
cendence whereby the subject is thrown open to the world is itself
entailed and we find ourselves in the presence of a nature which has
no need to be perceived in order to exist. If then we want to bring to
light the birth of being for us, we must finally look at that area of our
experience which clearly has significance and reality only for us, and
that is our affective life. Let us try to see how a thing or a being begins
to exist for us through desire or love and we shall thereby come to
understand better how things and beings can exist in general.

Ordinarily affectivity is conceived as a mosaic of emotional states,
of pleasures and pains each sealed within itself, mutually incompre¬
hensible, and explicable only in terms of the bodily system. If it is
conceded that in man the emotional life is ‘shot through with intel¬
ligence’ we mean that simple representations can take the place of
the natural stimuli of pleasure and pain, according to the laws govern¬
ing the association of ideas or governing the conditioned reflex, that
these substitutions superimpose pleasure and pain on circumstances
which are, naturally speaking, matters of indifference to us and that,
through one displacement after another, second or third order values
are created which bear no obvious relation to our natural pleasures
and pains. The objective world plays less and less directly on the

154

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

keyboard of ‘elementary’ emotional states, but their value remains
nevertheless as a possibility of pleasure and pain. Apart from ex¬
perience of pleasure and pain, of which there is nothing to be said,
the subject stands out by his power of representation, and affectivity
is not recognized as a distinctive form of consciousness. If this con¬
ception were correct, any sexual incapacity ought to amount either to
the loss of certain representations or else to a weakening of the capa¬
city for satisfaction. We shall see that this is not the case. One patient1
no longer seeks sexual intercourse of his own accord. Obscene pic¬
tures, conversations on sexual topics, the sight of a body do not
arouse desire in him. The patient hardly ever kisses, and the kiss for
him has no value as sexual stimulation. Reactions are strictly local
and do not begin to occur without contact. If the prelude is inter¬
rupted at this stage, there is no attempt to pursue the sexual cycle. In
the sexual act intromission is never spontaneous. If orgasm occurs
first in the partner and she moves away, the half-fulfilled desire
vanishes. At every stage it is as if the subject did not know what is to
be done. There are no active movements, save a few seconds before
the orgasm which is extremely brief. Nocturnal emissions are rare and
never accompanied by dreams. Are we to try to explain this sexual
inertia — as earlier we explained the loss of initiative in general move¬
ments — in terms of the disappearance of visual representations? The
difficulty here is in maintaining that there is no tactile representation
of sexual activity, and one is thus still left wondering why in Schnei¬
der’s case touch stimulation, and not only visual perception, has lost
much of its sexual significance. If now we work on the supposition of
some general failure of representation, both of touch and vision, the
problem still remains of describing the concrete aspect assumed by
this wholly formal deficiency in the realm of sexuality. For indeed
the infrequency of nocturnal emissions, for example, is not explained
by the weakness of representations, which are its effect rather than its
cause, and which would seem to point to some change in the charac¬
ter of the sexual life itself. If we presuppose some decline of normal
sexual reflexes or of pleasurable states, we are then faced with a case
tending rather to show that there are no sexual reflexes and no pure
state of pleasure. For, it will be recalled, all Schneider’s troubles
spring from a wound of limited extent in the occipital region. If
sexuality in man were an autonomous reflex apparatus, if the object
of sexual desire affected some organ of pleasurable sensation
anatomically defined, then the effect of the cerebral injury would be
to free these automatic responses and take the form of accentuated

1 Schneider once more, the patient whose motor and intellectual deficiencies we
have studied above, and whose emotional and sexual behaviour has been analysed
by Steinfeld, Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Sexualfunktion , pp. 175-80.

155

THE BODY

sexual behaviour. Pathology brings to light, somewhere between
automatic response and representation, a vital zone in which the
sexual possibilities of the patient are elaborated, in the same way, as
we saw above, as are his motor, perceptual and even intellectual
possibilities. There must be, immanent in sexual life, some function
which ensures its emergence, and the normal extension of sexuality
must rest on internal powers of the organic subject. There must be an
Eros or a Libido which breathes life into an original world, gives
sexual value or meaning to external stimuli and outlines for each
subject the use he shall make of his objective body. It is the very struc¬
ture of perception or erotic experience which has undergone change
in Schneider. In the case of the normal subject, a body is not per¬
ceived merely as any object; this objective perception has within it a
more intimate perception : the visible body is subtended by a sexual
schema, which is strictly individual, emphasizing the erogenous areas,
outlining a sexual physiognomy, and eliciting the gestures of the
masculine body which is itself integrated into this emotional totality.
But for Schneider a woman’s body has no particular essence: it is, he
says, pre-eminently character which makes a woman attractive, for
physically they are all the same. Close physical contact causes only a
‘vague feeling’, the knowledge of ‘an indeterminate something’ which
is never enough to ‘spark off’ sexual behaviour and create a situation
which requires a definite mode of resolution. Perception has lost its
erotic structure, both spatially and temporally. What has disappeared
from the patient is his power of projecting before himself a sexual
world, of putting himself in an erotic situation, or, once such a situa¬
tion is stumbled upon, of maintaining it or following it through to
complete satisfaction. The very word satisfaction has no longer any
meaning for him, since there is no intention or initiative of a sexual
kind which calls up a cycle of movements and states, which ‘patterns’
them and finds its satisfaction in them. In so far as the tactile stimuli
themselves, which the patient turns to excellent account under dif¬
ferent circumstances, have lost their sexual significance, it is because
they have so to speak ceased to speak to his body, to locate it in a
sexual context, or, in other words, because the patient no longer asks,
of his environment, this mute and permanent question which con¬
stitutes normal sexuality. Schneider, and the majority of impotent
subjects, ‘do not throw themselves into what they are doing’. But
absenLmindedness and inappropriate representations are not causes
but effects, and in so far as the subject coolly perceives the situation,
it is in the first place because he does not live it and is not caught up
i n it. At this stage one begins to suspect a mode of perception distinct
from objective perception, a kind of significance distinct from intel¬
lectual significance, an intentionality which is not pure ‘awareness of

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

something’. Erotic perception is not a cogitatio which aims at a
cogitatum ; through one body it aims at another body, and takes
place in the world, not in a consciousness. A sight has a sexual sig¬
nificance for me, not when I consider, even confusedly, its possible
relationship to the sexual organs or to pleasurable states, but when it
exists for my body, for that power always available for bringing to¬
gether into an erotic situation the stimuli applied, and adapting sexual
conduct to it. There is an erotic ‘comprehension’ not of the order of
understanding, since understanding subsumes an experience, once
perceived, under some idea, while desire comprehends blindly by
linking body to body. Even in the case of sexuality, which has never¬
theless long been regarded as pre-eminently the type of bodily func¬
tion, we are concerned, not with a peripheral involuntary action, but
with an intentionality which follows the general flow of existence and
yields to its movements. Schneider can no longer put himself into a
sexual situation any more than generally he occupies an effective one,
or one related to the formation of ideas. Faces are for him neither
attractive nor repulsive, and people appear to him in one light or an¬
other only in so far as he has direct dealings with them, and according
to the attitude they adopt towards him, and the attention and solici¬
tude which they bestow upon him. Sun and rain are neither gay nor
sad; his humour is determined by elementary organic functions only,
and the world is emotionally neutral. Schneider hardly extends his
sphere of human relationships at all, and when he makes new friend¬
ships they sometimes come to an unfortunate end: this is because
they never result, as can be seen on analysis, from a spontaneous im¬
pulse, but from a decision made in the abstract. He would like to be
able to think about politics and religion, but he does not even try,
knowing that these realms are closed to him, and we have seen that
generally speaking he never performs an act of authentic thought and
substitutes for the intuitive understanding of number or the grasp of
meanings the manipulation of signs and a technique depending on
‘points of support’.1 We discover both that sexual life is one more
form of original intentionality, and also bring to view the vital
origins of perception, motility and representation by basing all these
‘processes’ on an ‘intentional arc’ which gives way in the patient,
and which, in the normal subject, endows experience with its degree
of vitality and fruitfulness.

Thus sexuality is not an autonomous cycle. It has internal links
with the whole active and cognitive being, these three sectors of
behaviour displaying one typical structure, and standing in a relation¬
ship to each other of reciprocal expression. Here we concur with the
most lasting discoveries of psychoanalysis. Whatever the theoretical

1 Cf. supra, p. 133.

157

THE BODY

declarations of Freud may have been, psychoanalytical research is in
fact led to an explanation of man, not in terms of his sexual substruc¬
ture, but to a discovery in sexuality of relations and attitudes which
had previously been held to reside in consciousness . Thus the signifi¬
cance of psychoanalysis is less to make psychology biological than to
discover a dialectical process in functions thought of as ‘purely
bodily’, and to reintegrate sexuality into the human being. A break¬
away disciple of Freud1 shows, for example, that frigidity is scarcely
ever bound up with anatomical or physiological conditions, but that
it expresses in most cases a refusal of orgasm, of femininity or of
sexuality, and this in turn expresses the rejection of the sexual partner
and of the destiny which he represents. It would be a mistake to
imagine that even with Freud psychoanalysis rules out the description
of psychological motives, and is opposed to the phenomenological
method: psychoanalysis has, on the contrary, albeit unwittingly,
helped to develop it by declaring, as Freud puts it, that every human
action ‘has a meaning’,2 and by making every effort to understand
the event, short of relating it to mechanical circumstances.

For Freud himself the sexual is not the genital, sexual life is not a
mere effect of the processes having their seat in the genital organs,
the libido is not an instinct, or an activity directed naturally towards
definite ends, it is the general power, which the psychosomatic subject
enjoys, of taking root in different settings, of establishing himself
through different experiences, of gaining structures of conduct. It is
what causes a man to have a history. In so far as a man’s sexual
history provides a key to his life, it is because in his sexuality is pro¬
jected his manner of being towards the world, that is, towards time
and other men. There are sexual symptoms at the root of all neuroses,
but these symptoms, correctly interpreted, symbolize a whole atti¬
tude, whether, for example, one of conquest or of flight. Into the
sexual history, conceived as the elaboration of a general form of life,
all psychological constituents can enter, because there is no longer an
interaction of two causalities and because the genital life is geared to
the whole life of the subject. So the question is not so much whether
human life does or does not rest on sexuality, as of knowing what is
to be understood by sexuality. Psychoanalysis represents a double

1 W. Stekel, La Femme frigide .

2 Freud, Introductory Lectures , p. 31. Freud himself, in his concrete analyses,
abandons causal thought, when he demonstrates that symptoms always have
several meanings, or, as he puts it, are ‘overdetermined’. For this amounts to
admitting that a symptom, at the time of its onset, always finds raisons d^Stre in
the subject, so that no event in a life is, strictly speaking, externally determined.
Freud compares the accident, occurring from outside, to the foreign body which,
for the oyster, is merely the occasion for secreting a pearl. See for example Cinq
psychanalyses, Chap. I, p. 91, note 1.

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

trend of thought: on the one hand it stresses the sexual substructure
of life, on the other it ‘expands’ the notion of sexuality to the extent
of absorbing into it the whole of existence. But precisely for that
reason, its conclusions, like those of our last paragraph but one, re¬
main ambiguous. When we generalize the notion of sexuality, making
it a manner of being in the physical and inter-human world, do we
mean, in the last analysis, that all existence has a sexual significance
or that every sexual phenomenon has an existential significance? In
the first hypothesis, existence would be an abstraction, another name
for the sexual life. But since the sexual life can no longer be circum¬
scribed since it is no longer a separate function definable in terms of
the causality proper to a set of organs, there is now no sense in saying
that all existence is understood through the sexual life, or rather this
statement becomes a tautology. Must we then say, conversely, that
the sexual phenomenon is merely an expression of our general man¬
ner of projecting our setting ? But the sexual life is not a mere reflec¬
tion of existence: an effective life, in the political and ideological
field, for example, can be associated with impaired sexuality, and may
even benefit from such impairment. On the other hand, the sexual
life may, as in Casanova’s case for example, possess a kind of techni¬
cal perfection corresponding to no particularly vigorous version of
being in the world. Even though the sexual apparatus has, running
through it, the general current of life, it may monopolize it to its own
advantage. Life is particularized into separate currents. If words are
to have any meaning, the sexual life is a sector of our life bearing a
special relation to the existence of sex. There can be no question of
allowing sexuality to become lost in existence, as if it were no more
then an epiphenomenon. For if we admit that the sexual troubles of
neurotics are an expression of their basic drama in magnified form,
it still remains to be seen why the sexual expression of the drama is
more immature, more frequent and more striking than the rest; and
why sexuality is not only a symptom, but a highly important one.
Here we meet once more a problem which we have already encoun¬
tered several times. We showed with Gestalt theory that no layer of
sense-data can be identified as immediately dependent on sense-
organs : the smallest sense-datum is never presented in any other way
than integrated into a configuration and already ‘patterned’. This, as
we have said, does not prevent the words ‘see’ and ‘hear’ from having
a meaning. We have drawn attention elsewhere1 to the fact that the
specialized regions of the brain, the ‘optical zone’, for example, never
function in isolation. The fact remains, as we pointed out, that the
visual or auditory side predominates in the picture of the illness,
according to the region in which the lesions are situated. Finally, as
1 La Structure du Comportement , pp. 80 and ff.

159

THE BODY

wc have indicated above, biological existence is synchronized with
human existence and is never indifferent to its distinctive rhythm.
Nevertheless, we shall now add, ‘living’ ( leben ) is a primary process
from which, as a starting point, it becomes possible to ‘Jive’ ( erleberi )
this or that world, and we must eat and breathe before perceiving
and awakening to relational living, belonging to colours and lights
through sight, to sounds through hearing, to the body of another
through sexuality, before arriving at the life of human relations. Thus
sight, hearing, sexuality, the body are not only the routes, instru¬
ments or manifestations of personal existence: the latter takes up and
absorbs into itself their existence as it is anonymously given. When we
say that the life of the body, or the flesh, and the life of the psyche
are involved in a relationship of reciprocal expression , or that the
bodily event always has a psychic meaning , these formulations need
to be explained. Valid as they are for excluding causal thought, they
do not mean that the body is the transparent integument of Spirit.
The return to existence, as to the setting in which the communication
between body and mind can be understood, is not a return to Con¬
sciousness or Spirit, and existential psychoanalysis must not serve as
a pretext for a revival of spiritualism. This will be better understood
if we clarify the notions of ‘expression’ and ‘meaning’ which belong
to the world of language and thought as already constituted, which
we have just applied uncritically to the body-mind relationship, and
which bodily experience must in fact lead us to correct.

A girl1 whose mother has forbidden her to see again the young man
with whom she is in love, cannot sleep, loses her appetite and finally
the use of speech. An initial manifestation of this loss of speech is
found to have occurred during her childhood, after an earthquake,
and subsequently again following a severe fright. A strictly Freudian
interpretation of this would introduce a reference to the oral phase of
sexual development. But what is ‘fixated’ on the mouth is not merely
sexual existence, but, more generally, those relations with others
having the spoken word as their vehicle. In so far as the emotion
elects to find its expression in loss of speech, this is because of all
bodily functions speech is the most intimately linked with communal
existence, or, as we shall put it, with co-existence. Loss of speech,
then, stands for the refusal of co-existence, just as, in other subjects,
a fit of hysterics is the means of escaping from the situation. The
patient breaks with relational life within the family circle. More
generally, she tends to break with life itself: her inability to swallow
food arises from the fact that swallowing symbolizes the movement of
existence which carries events and assimilates them; the patient is
unable, literally, to ‘swallow’ the prohibition which has been imposed
1 Binswanger, Vber Psychotherapie, pp. 113 and ff.

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

upon her.1 In the subject’s childhood, fear was translated by loss of
speech because the imminence of death violently interrupted co¬
existence, and threw her back upon her own personal fate. The symp¬
tom of aphonia reappears because the mother’s prohibition restores
the situation metaphorically, and because, moreover, by shutting off
the future from the subject, it leads her back to her favourite forms of
behaviour. These motivations may be supposed to take advantage of
a particular sensitivity of the throat and the mouth in the case of our
subject, a sensitivity which may be related to the history of her libido
and to the oral phase of sexuality. Thus through the sexual signifi¬
cance of symptoms can be discerned, in faint outline, their more
general significance in relation to past and future, to the self and
others, that is to say, to the fundamental dimensions of existence. But
as we shall see, the body does not constantly express the modalities
of existence in the way that stripes indicate rank, or a house-number
a house : the sign here does not only convey its significance, it is filled
with it; it is, in a way, what it signifies, as a portrait is the quasi-
presence of the absent Peter,2 or as wax figures in magic are what they
stand for. The sick girl does not mime with her body a drama played
out ‘in her consciousness’. By losing her voice she does not present a
public version of an ‘inner state’, she does not make a ‘gesture’ like
that of the head of a state shaking hands with the engine driver and
embracing a peasant, or that of a friend who takes offence and stops
speaking to me. To have lost one’s voice is not to keep silence: one
keeps silence only when one can speak. It is true that loss of voice is
not paralysis, and this is proved by the fact that, treated by psycho¬
logical means and left free by her family to see the man she loves, the
girl recovers her power of speech. Yet neither is aphonia a deliberate
or voluntary silence. It is generally known how, by the notion of
pithiatism,* the theory of hysteria has been carried beyond the
dilemma of paralysis (or of anasthesia) and simulation. If the hysteri¬
cal patient is a deceiver, it is first and foremost himself that he de¬
ceives, so that it is impossible to separate what he really feels or thinks
and what he overtly expresses : pithiatism is a disease of the Cogito ,
consciousness which has become ambivalent and not a deliberate
refusal to declare what one knows. Here, in the same way, the girl
does not cease to speak, she ‘loses’ her voice as one loses a memory.
It is true again that, as psychoanalysis shows, the lost memory is not
accidentally lost, it is lost rather in so far as it belongs to an area of

1 Binswanger (Ober Psychotherapie, p. 188), points out that one patient, as he
recollects a traumatic memory, and tells it to the doctor, relaxes the sphincter.

2 J. P. Sartre, VImaginaire , p. 38.

* Pithiatism: the class of hysterical symptoms which can be made to disappear
or be reproduced by means of suggestion (Translator’s note).

161

THE BODY

my life which I reject, in so far as it has a certain significance and,
like all significances, this one exists only for someone. Forgetfulness
is therefore an act; 1 keep the memory at arm’s length, as I look past
a person whom I do not wish to see. Yet, as psychoanalysis too shows
to perfection, though the resistance certainly presupposes an inten¬
tional relationship with the memory resisted, it does not set it before
us as an object ; it does not specifically reject the memory. It is directed
against a region of our experience, a certain category, a certain class
of memories. The subject who has left a book, which was a present
from his wife, in a drawer, and forgotten all about it, and who re¬
discovers it when they have become reconciled once more,1 hacT not
really lost the book, but neither did he know where it was. Everything
connected with his wife had ceased to exist for him, he had shut it out
from his life, and at one stroke, broken the circuit of all actions relat¬
ing to her, and thus placed himself on the hither side of all knowledge
and ignorance, assertion and negation, in so far as these were volun¬
tary. Thus, in hysteria and repression, we may well overlook some¬
thing although we know of it, because our memories and our body,
instead of presenting themselves to us in singular and determinate
conscious acts, are enveloped in generality. Through this generality
we still ‘have them’, but just enough to hold them at a distance from
us. We discover in this way that sensory messages or memories are
expressly grasped and recognized by us only in so far as they adhere
generally to that area of our body and our life to which they are rele¬
vant. Such adherence or rejection places the subject in a definite
situation and sets bounds, as far as he is concerned, to the immediately
available mental field, as the acquisition or loss of a sense organ pre¬
sents to or removes from his direct grasp an object in the physical
field. It cannot be said that the factual situation thus created is the
mere consciousness of a situation, for that would amount to saying
that the ‘forgotten’ memory, arm or leg are arrayed before my con¬
sciousness, present and near to me in the same sense as are the ‘pre¬
served’ regions of my past or of my body. No more can it be said that
the loss of voice is voluntary. Will presupposes a field of possibilities
among which I choose; here is Peter, I can speak to him or not. But
if I lose my power of speech, Peter no longer exists for me as an inter¬
locutor, sought after or rejected; what collapses is the whole field of
possibilities. I cut myself off even from that mode of communication
and significance which silence provides. Of course we may go on to
speak of hypocrisy or bad faith. But then it wiil be necessary to draw
a distinction between psychological and metaphysical hypocrisy. The
former deceives others by concealing from them thoughts expressly
in th6 mind of the subject. It is fortuitous and easily avoided. The
1 Freud, Introductory Lectures , p. 43.

162

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

latter is self-deceiving through the medium of generality, thus leading
finally to a state or a situation which is not an inevitability, but which
is not posited or voluntary. It is even to be found in the ‘sincere’ or
‘authentic’ man whenever he tries to throw off all reserve whatsoever,
it is part of the human lot. When the hysterical fit has reached its
climax, even if the subject has sought it as the means of escaping from
an intolerable situation and plunges into it as into a place of refuge,
he scarcely hears anything more, he can scarcely see, he has almost
become the spasmodic and panting existence which struggles on the
bed. The intensity of resentment is such that it becomes resentment
against X, against life, an absolute resentment. With every minute
that passes, freedom is depreciated and becomes less probable. Even
if it is never impossible and even if it may always refute the
rationalizations of bad faith, the fact remains that a night’s sleep has
the same power: what can be surmounted by this anonymous force
must indeed be of the same nature as it, and so it must at least be
admitted that resentment or loss of voice, as they persist, become
consistent like things, that they assume a structure, and that any deci¬
sion that interrupted them would come from a lower level than that
of ‘will’. The patient cuts himself off from his voice as certain insects
sever one of their own legs. He is literally without a voice. In treating
this condition, psychological medicine does not act on the patient by
making him aware of the origin of his illness: sometimes a touch of
the hand puts a stop to the spasms and restores to the patient his
speech1 and the same procedure, having acquired a ritual signifi¬
cance, will subsequently be enough to deal with fresh attacks. In any
case, in psychological treatment of any kind, the coming to awareness
would remain purely cognitive, the patient would not accept the
meaning of his disturbances as revealed to him without the personal
relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and
friendship felt towards him, and the change of existence resulting
from this friendship. Neither symptom nor cure is worked out at the
level of objective or positing consciousness, but below that level.
Loss of voice as a situation may be compared to sleep : I lie down in
bed, on my left side, with my knees drawn up; I close my eyes and
breathe slowly, putting my plans out of my mind. But the power of
my will or consciousness stops ther&, As the faithful, in the Dionysian
mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up
the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the
sleeper. The god is actually there when the faithful can no longer dis¬
tinguish themselves from the part they are playing, when their body
and their consciousness cease to bring in, as an obstacle, their par¬
ticular opacity, and when they are totally fused in the myth. There is a
1 Binswanger, Vber Psychotherapie , pp. 113 and ff.

163

THE BODY

moment when sleep ‘comes’, settling on this imitation of itself which
I have been offering to it, and l succeed in becoming what I was trying
to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in
space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alert¬
ness of the senses. It is true that this last link makes waking up a pos¬
sibility: through these half-open doors things will return or the
sleeper will come back into the world. In the same way the patient
who has broken witli co-existence can still perceive the sensible in¬
tegument of other people, and abstractly conceive the future by
means, for instance, of a calendar. In this sense the sleeper is never
completely isolated within himself, never totally a sleeper, and the
patient is never totally cut off from the intersubjectivc world, never
totally ill. But what, in the sleeper and the patient, makes possible a
return to the real world, are still only impersonal functions, sense
organs and language. We remain free in relation to sleep and sickness
to the exact extent to which we remain always involved in the waking,
and healthy state, our freedom rests on our being in a situation, and
is itself a situation. Sleep and waking, illness and health are not
modalities of consciousness or will, but presuppose an ‘existential
step’.1 Loss of voice does not merely represent a refusal of speech, or
anorexia* a refusal of life; they are the refusal of others, or refusal
of a future torn from the transitive nature of ‘inner phenomena’,
generalized, consummated, transformed into de facto situations.

The body’s role is to ensure this metamorphosis. It transforms
ideas into things, and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep. The body
can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes
it. It sustains its dual existential action of systole and diastole. On the
one hand, indeed, it is the possibility enjoyed by my existence of dis¬
carding itself, of making itself anonymous and passive, and of bog¬
ging itself down in a scholastic. In the case of the girl just discussed,
the move towards the future, towards the living present or towards
the past, the power of learning, of maturing, of entering into com¬
munication with others, have become, as it were, arrested in a bodily
symptom, existence is tied up and the body has become ‘the place
where life hides away’;* For the patient, nothing further happens,
nothing assumes meaning and form in life, or more precisely there
occurs only a recurrent and always identical ‘now’, life flows back on
itself and history is dissolved in natural time. Even when normal and
even when involved in situations with other people, the subject, in
so far as he has a body, retains every moment the power to withdraw
from it. At the very moment when I live in the world, when I am given

1 Binswanger, Ober Psychotherapie, p. 188.

2 Ibid., p. 182.

* Anorexia: loss of appetite (Translator's note).

164

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

over to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, I can
close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose
myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anony¬
mous life which subtends my personal one. But precisely because my
body can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out
upon the world and places me in a situation there. The momentum of
existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can
be restored as a river unfreezes. The girl will recover her voice, not by
an intellectual effort or by an abstract decree of the will, but through
a conversion in which the whole of her body makes a concentrated
effort in the form of a genuine gesture, as we seek and recover a name
forgotten not ‘in our mind’, but ‘in our head’ or ‘on the tip of our
tongue’. The memory or the voice is recovered when the body once
more opens itself to others or to the past, when it opens the way to
co-existence and once more (in the active sense) acquires significance
beyond itself. Moreover, even when cut off from the circuit of exist¬
ence, the body never quite falls back on to itself. Even if I become
absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensa¬
tions, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world.
At every moment some intention springs afresh from me, if it is only
towards, the things round about me which catch my eye, or towards
the instants, which are thrown up, and which thrust back into the
past what I have just lived through. I never become quite a thing in
the world; the density of existence as a thing always evades me, my
own substance slips away from me internally, and some intention is
always foreshadowed. In so far as it carries within it ‘sense organs’,
bodily existence is never self-sufficient, it is always a prey to an active
nothingness, it continually sets the prospect of living before me, and
natural time at every successive moment adumbrates the empty form
of the true event. This prospect may indeed fail to elicit any response.
The instant of natural time does not establish anything, it has to be
immediately renewed, and indeed is renewed in another instant, and
the sensory functions by themselves do not cause me to be in the
world : when I become absorbed in my body, my eyes present me with
no more than the perceptible outer covering of things and of other
people, things themselves take on unreality, behaviour degenerates
into the absurd, and the present itself, as in cases of false recognition,
loses its consistency and takes on an air of eternity. Bodily existence
which runs through me, yet does so independently of me, is only the
barest raw material of a genuine presence in the world. Yet at least
it provides the possibility of such presence, and establishes our first
consonance with the world. I may very well take myself away from
the human world and set aside personal existence, but only to redis¬
cover in my body the same power, this time unnamed, by which I am

165

THE BODY

condemned to being. It may be said that the body is ‘the hidden form
of being ourself’,1 2 or on the other hand, that personal existence is the
taking up and manifestation of a being in a given situation. If we
therefore say that the body expresses existence at every moment, this
is in the sense in which a word expresses thought. Anterior to conven¬
tional means of expression, which reveal my thoughts to others only
because already, for both myself and them, meanings are provided
for each sign, and which in this sense do not give rise to genuine
communication at all, we must, as we shall see, recognize a primary
process of signification in which the thing expressed does not exist
apart from the expression, and in which the signs themselves induce
their significance externally. In this way the body expresses total
existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that exist¬
ence, but because existence comes into its own in the body. This
incarnate significance is the central phenomenon of which body and
mind, sign and significance are abstract moments.

Understood in this way, the relation of expression to thing ex¬
pressed, or of sign to meaning is not a one-way relationship like that
between original text and translation. Neither body nor existence can
be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose
each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence,
and existence a perpetual incarnation. What is particularly important,
is that when we say that sexuality has an existential significance or
that it expresses existence, this is not to be understood as meaning
that the sexual drama® is in the last analysis only a manifestation or a
symptom of an existential drama. The same reason that prevents us
from ‘reducing’ existence to the body or to sexuality, prevents us also
from ‘reducing’ sexuality to existence: the fact is that existence is not
a set of facts (like ‘psychic facts’) capable of being reduced to others
or to which they can reduce themselves, but the ambiguous setting
of their inter-communication, the point at which their boundaries run
into each other, or again their woven fabric. There is no question of
making human existence walk ‘on its head’. There is no doubt at all
that we must recognize in modesty, desire and love in general a meta¬
physical significance, which means that they are incomprehensible if
man is treated as a machine governed by natural laws, or even as ‘a
bundle of instincts’, and that they are relevant to man as a conscious¬
ness and as a freedom. Usually man does not show his body, and,
when he does, it is either nervously or with an intention to fascinate.
He has the impression that the alien gaze which runs over his body is

1 Binswanger, Vber Psychotherapie, ‘cine verdeckte Form unseres Selbstseins’

p. 188.

2 We here take the word in its etymological sense (and without any Romantic
overtone) as did Foiitzer, Critique des fondements de !a psychologic, p. 23.

166

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

stealing it from him, or else, on the other hand, that the display of his
body will deliver the other person up to him, defenceless, and that in
this case the other will be reduced to servitude. Shame and im¬
modesty, then, take their place in a dialectic of the self and the other
which is that of master and slave: in so far as I have a body, I may
be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another
person, and no longer count as a person for him, or else I may be¬
come his master and, in my turn, look at him. But this mastery is
self-defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized through
the other’s desire, he is no longer the person by whom I wished to be
recognized, but a being fascinated, deprived of his freedom, and who
therefore no longer counts in my eyes.

Saying that I have a body is thus a way of saying that I can be seen
as an object and that I try to be seen as a subject, that another can
be my master or my slave, so that shame and shamelessness express
the dialectic of the plurality of consciousnesses, and have a meta¬
physical significance. The same might be said of sexual desire : if it
cannot accept the presence of a third party as witness, if it feels that
too natural an attitude or over-casual remarks, on the part of the
desired person, are signs of hostility, this is because it seeks to fasci¬
nate, and because the observing third party or the person desired, if
he is too free in manner, escapes this fascination. What we try to
possess, then, is not just a body, but a body brought to life by con¬
sciousness. As Alain says, one does not love a madwoman, except in
so far as one has loved her before the onset of madness. The im¬
portance we attach to the body and the contradictions of love are,
therefore, related to a more general drama which arises from the
metaphysical structure of my body, which is both an object for others
and a subject for myself. The intensity of sexual pleasure would not
be sufficient to explain the place occupied by sexuality in human life
or, for example, the phenomenon of eroticism, if sexual experience
were not, as it were, an opportunity, vouchsafed to all and always
available, of acquainting oneself with the human lot in its most
general aspects of autonomy and dependence. The embarrassments
and fears involved in human behaviour are not explainable in terms
of the sexual concern, since it contains them already. On the other
hand we do not reduce sexuality to something other than itself by
relating it to the ambiguity of the body. For, to thought, the body as
an object is not ambiguous; it becomes so only in the experience
which we have of it, and pre-eminently in sexual experience, and
through the fact of sexuality. To treat sexuality as a dialectic is not
to make a process of knowledge out of it, nor to identify a man’s
history with the history of his consciousness. The dialectic is not a
relationship between contradictory and inseparable thoughts; it is

167

THE BODY

the tending of an existence towards another existence which denies
it, and yet without which it is not sustained. Metaphysics — the com¬
ing to light of something beyond nature — is not localized at the level
of knowledge: it begins with the opening out upon ‘another’, and is
to be found everywhere, and already, in the specific development of
sexuality. It is true that, with Freud, we have generalized the notion
of sexuality. How can we then talk about a distinctive development
of sexuality? How can we identify a content of consciousness as
sexual ? Indeed we cannot. Sexuality conceals itself from itself be¬
neath a mask of generality, and continually tries to escape from the
tension and drama which it sets up. But again, how are we justified
in saying that it hides itself from itself, as if it were our life’s subject?
Should we not simply say that it is transcended and submerged in
the more general drama of existence? Here two mistakes are to be
avoided : one is to fail to recognize in existence any content other than
its obvious one, which is arranged in the form of distinct representa¬
tions, as do philosophies of consciousness; the other is to duplicate
this obvious content with a latent content, also consisting of re¬
presentations, as do psychologies of the unconscious. Sexuality is
neither transcended in human life nor shown up at its centre by
unconscious representations. It is at all times present there like an
atmosphere. The dreamer does not first visualize the latent content
of his dream, the one, that is, which is to be revealed with the help of
suitable images by the ‘second account’ ; he does not first perceive ‘in
clear’ the stimuli of genital origin as being genital, only subsequently
translating the text into figurative language. For the dreamer, indeed,
who is far removed from the language of the waking state, this or that
genital excitation or sexual drive is without more ado this image of a
wall being climbed or cliff-face being scaled, which are seen as the
obvious content. Sexuality becomes diffused in images which derive
from it only certain typical relationships, only a certain general
emotional physiognomy. The dreamer’s penis becomes the' serpent
which appears in the obvious content.1 What we have just said about
the dreamer applies equally to that ever slumbering part of ourselves
which we feel to be anterior to our representations, to that individual
haze through which we perceive the world. There are here blurred
outlines, distinctive relationships which are in no way ‘unconscious’
and which, we are well aware, are ambiguous, having reference to
sexuality without specifically calling it to mind. From the part of the
body which it especially occupies, sexuality spreads forth like an
odour or like a sound. Here we encounter once more that general
function of unspoken transposition which we have already recognized
in the body during our investigation of the body image. When I move
1 Laforgue, VEchec de Baudelaire , p. 126.

168

THE BODY IN ITS SI-XUAL BEING

my hand towards a thing, T know implicitly that my arm unbends.
When I move my eyes, I take account of their movement, without
being expressly conscious of the fact, and am thereby aware that the
upheaval caused in my field of vision is only apparent. Similarly
sexuality, without being the object of any intended act of conscious¬
ness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken
in this way, as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive
with life. In other words, ambiguity is of the essence of human exist¬
ence, and everything we live or think has always several meanings. A
way of life — an attitude of escapism and need of solitude — is perhaps
a generalized expression of a certain state of sexuality. In thus becom¬
ing transformed into existence, sexuality has taken upon itself so
general a significance, the sexual theme has contrived to be for the
subject the occasion for so many accurate and true observations in
themselves, of so many rationally based decisions, and it has become
so loaded with the passage of time that it is an impossible undertaking
to seek, within the framework of sexuality, the explanation of the
framework of existence. The fact remains that this existence is the
act of taking up and making explicit a sexual situation, and that in
this way it has always at least a double sense. There is interfusion
between sexuality and existence, which means that existence per¬
meates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine,
in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other
motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-
sexual’. Thus there is in human existence a principle of indeter¬
minacy, and this indeterminacy is not only for us, it does not stem
from some imperfection of our knowledge, and we must not imagine
that any God could sound our hearts and minds and determine what
we owe to nature and what to freedom, Existence is indeterminate in
itself, by reason of its fundamental structure, and in so far as it is the
very process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on* meaning,-,
whereby what had merely a sexual significance assumes a more
general one, chance is transformed into reason; in so far as it is the
act of taking up a de facto situation. We shall give the name trans¬
cendence to this act in which existence takes up, for its own purposes,
and transforms such a situation. Precisely because it is transcendence,
existence never utterly outruns anything, for in that case the tension
which is essential to it would disappear. It never abandons itself.
What it is never remains external and accidental to it, since this is
always taken up and integrated into it. Sexuality therefore ought not,
any more than the body in general, to be regarded as a fortuitous
content of our experience. Existence has no fortuitous attributes, no
content which does* not contribute towards giving it its form; it does
not give admittance to any pure fact because it is the process by

169

THE BODY

which facts are drawn up. It will perhaps be objected that the or¬
ganization of our body is contingent, that we can ‘conceive a man
without hands, feet, head’1 and, a fortiori a sexless man, self-pro¬
pagating by cutting or layering. But this is the case only if we take an
abstract view of hands, feet, head or sexual apparatus, regarding
them, that is, as fragments of matter, and ignoring their living func¬
tion. Only, indeed, if we form an abstract notion of man in general,
into which only the Cogitatio is allowed to enter. If, on the other
hand, we conceive man in terms of his experience, that is to say, of
his distinctive way of patterning the world, and if we reintegrate the
‘organs’ into the functional totality in which they play their part, a
handless or sexless man is as inconceivable as one without the power
of thought. It will be further objected that our contention ceases to
be paradoxical only at the price of becoming a tautology: we are
saying in effect that a man would be different from what he is, and
would therefore no longer be a man, if he were without any of the_
relational systems which in fact he possesses. But, it will be added,
this arises from our conception of man as empirical man, as he in
fact exists, and from our relating, as through an essential necessity
and within the context of a human a priori , characteristics of this
given totality which have been brought together simply by the inter¬
play of multiple causes and the caprice of nature. In fact, we do not
imagine, through any backward-looking illusion, any essential neces¬
sity, we point out an existential connection. Since, as we have shown
above in the examination of Schneider’s case, all human ‘functions’,
from sexuality to motility and intelligence, are rigorously unified in
one synthesis, it is impossible to distinguish in the total being of man
a bodily organization to be treated as a contingent fact, and other
attributes necessarily entering into his make-up. Everything in man
is a necessity. For example, it is no mere coincidence that the rational
being is also the one who holds himself upright or has a thumb which
can be brought opposite to the fingers; the same manner of existing
is evident in both aspects.2 On the other hand everything in man is
contingency in the sense that this human manner of existence is not
guaranteed to every human child through some essence acquired at
birth, and in the sense that it must be constantly reforged in him
through the hazards encountered by the objective body. Man is a
historical idea and not a natural species. In other words, there is in
human existence no unconditioned possession, and yet no fortuitous
attribute. Human existence will force us to revise our usual notion
of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of
contingency into necessity by the act of carrying forward. All that we

1 Pascal, Pensees et Opuscules (ed. Brunschvicg), Section VI, No. 339, p. 486.

a Cf. La Structure du Comportement , pp. 160-1.

170

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

are, we are on the basis of a de facto situation which we appropriate
to ourselves and which we ceaselessly transform by a sort of escape
which is never an unconditioned freedom. There is no explanation of
sexuality which reduces it to anything other than itself, for it is
already something other than itself, and indeed, if we like, our whole
being. Sexuality, it is said, is dramatic because we commit our whole
personal life to it. But just why do we do this? Why is our body, for
us, the mirror of our being, unless because it is a natural self a cur¬
rent of given existence, with the result that we never know whether
the forces which bear us on are its or ours — or with the result rather
that they are never entirely either its or ours. There is no outstripping
of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality enclosed within
itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.1

1 One can no more get rid of historical materialism than of psychoanalysis by
impugning ‘reductionist’ conceptions and causal thought in the name of a de¬
scriptive and phenomenological method, for historical materialism is no more
Jinked to such ‘causal1 formulations as may have been given than is psycho¬
analysis, and like the latter it could be expressed in another language. It consists
just as much in making economics historical as in making history economic. The
economics on which it bases history is not, as in classical economics, a closed
cycle of objective phenomena, but a correlation of productive forces and forms
of production, which is completed only when the former emerge from their
anonymity, become aware of themselves and are thus capable of imposing a form
on the future. Now, the coming to awareness is clearly a cultural phenomenon,
and through it all psychological motivations may find their way into the web of
history . A ‘materialist1 history of the 1917 Revolution does not consist of explain¬
ing each revolutionary thrust in terms of the retail price index at the moment in
question, but of putting it back in the class dynamism and interplay of psycho¬
logical forces, which fluctuated between February and October, between the new
proletarian power and the old conservative power. Economics is reintegrated into
history rather than history’s being reduced to economics. ‘Historical materialism’,
in the works inspired by It, is often nothing but a concrete conception of history
which brings under consideration, besides its obvious content (the official rela¬
tions between ‘citizens1 in a democracy, for instance) its latent content, or the
relations between human persons as they are actually established in concrete
living. When ‘materialist’ history identifies democracy as a ‘formal1 regime, and
describes the conflicts with which such a regime is tom, the real subject of history,
which it is trying to extract from beneath the juridical abstraction called the
citizen, is not only the economic subject, man as a factor in production, but in
more general terms the living subject, man as creativity, as a person trying to
endow his life with form, loving, haling, creating or not creating works of art,
having or not having children. Historical materialism is not a causality exclusive
to economics. One is tempted to say that it does not base history and ways of
thinking on production and ways of working, but more generally on ways of
existing and co-existing, on human relationships. It does not bring the history of
ideas down to economic history, but replaces these ideas in the one history which
they both express, and which is that of social existence. Solipsism as a philoso¬
phical doctrine is not the result of a system of private property; nevertheless
into economic institutions as into conceptions of the world is projected the same
existential prejudice in favour of isolation and mistrust.

171

THE BODY

Yet this interpretation of historical materialism may appear ambiguous. We
are ‘expanding’ the notion of economics as Freud expands that of sexuality; we
are bringing into it, besides the process of production and the struggle of economic
forces against economic forms, the constellation of psychological and moral
motives which combine to determine this struggle. But does not the word ‘eco¬
nomics’ thus lose all definite meaning ? If economic relations are not expressed in
the mode of Mitsein , is not the mode of Mitsein expressed in economic relations ?
When we relate both private property and solipsism to a certain structure of
Mitsein , are we not once more turning history upside down ? And must we not
choose between the following two theses: either the drama of co-existence has a
purely economic significance, or else the economic drama is absorbed into a wider
drama and has only an existential meaning, which brings back spiritualism.

It is precisely this dilemma, which the notion of existence, properly understood,
enables us to leave behind, and what we have said above about the existential
conception of ‘expression’ and ‘significance’ must be reapplied here. An existential
theory of history is ambiguous, but this ambiguity cannot be made a matter of
reproach, for it is inherent in things. Only at the approach of revolution does his¬
tory follow the lines dictated by economics, and, as in the case of the individual
life, sickness subjects a man to the vital rhythm of his body, so in a revolutionary
situation such as a general strike, factors governing production come clearly to
light, and are specifically seen as decisive. Even so we have seen just now that the
outcome depends on how the opposing forces think of each other. It is all the
more true, then, that during periods of depression, economic factors are effective
only to the extent that they are lived and taken up by a human subject, wrapped
up, that is, in ideological shreds by a process amounting to self-deception, or
rather permanent equivocation, which is yet part of history and has a weight of
its own. Neither the conservative nor the proletarian is conscious of being engaged
in merely an economic struggle, and they always bring a human significance to
their action. In thi£ sense there is never any pure economic causality, because
economics is not a closed system but is a part of the total and concrete existence
of society. But an existential conception of history does not deprive economic
situations of their power of motivation. If existence is the permanent act by which
man takes up, for his own purposes, and makes his own a certain de facto situa¬
tion, none of his thoughts will be able to be quite detached from the historical
context in which he lives, and particularly from his economic situation. Precisely
because economics is not a closed world, and because all motivations intermingle
at the core of history, the external becomes internal, and the internal external,
and no constituent of our existence can ever be outrun. It would be ridiculous to
regard Paul Valery’s poetry as a mere episode of economic disturbance: pure
poetry can have an eternal meaning. But it is not ridiculous to seek, in the social
and economic drama, in the world of our Mitsein , the motive for this coming to
awareness. Just as all our life, as we have said, breathes a sexual atmosphere,
without its being possible to identify a single content of consciousness which is
‘purely sexual’ or which is not sexual at all, so the economic and social drama
provides each consciousness with a certain background or even a certain imago
which it sets about deciphering in its own way and, in this sense, it is co-extensive
with history. The act of the artist or philosopher is free, but not motiveless. Their
freedom resides in the power of equivocation of which we spoke above, or in the
process of escape discussed earlier; it consists in appropriating a de facto situation
by endowing it with a figurative meaning beyond its real one. Thus Marx, not
content to be the son of a lawyer and student of philosophy, conceives his own
situation as that of a ‘lower middle class intellectual’ in the new perspective of the
class struggle. Thus does Valery transmute into pure poetry a disquiet and solitude
of which others would have made nothing. Thought is the life of human relation-

172

THE BODY IN ITS SEXUAL BEING

ships as it understands and interprets itself. In this voluntary act of carrying for¬
ward, this passing from objective to subjective, it is impossible to say just where
historical forces end and ours begin, and strictly speaking the question is mean¬
ingless, since there is history only for a subject who lives through it, and a subject
only in so far as he is historically situated. There is no one meaning of history;
what we do has always several meanings, and this is where an existential con¬
ception of history is distinguishable from materialism and from spiritualism. But
every cultural phenomenon has, among others, an economic significance, and
history by its nature never transcends, any more than it is reducible to, econo¬
mics. Conceptions of law, morality, religion and economic structure are involved
in a network of meanings within the Unity of the social event, as the parts of the
body are mutually implicatory within the Unity of the gesture, or as ‘physio¬
logical’, ‘psychological’ and ‘moral’ motives are linked in the Unity of an action.
It is impossible to reduce the life which involves human relationships either to
economic relations, or to juridical and moral ones thought up by men, just as it
is impossible to reduce individual life either to bodily functions or to our know¬
ledge of life as it involves them. But in each case, one of the orders of significance
can be regarded as dominant: one gesture as ‘sexual’, another as ‘amorous’, an¬
other as ‘warlike’, and even in the sphere of co-existence, one period of history
can be seen as characterized by intellectual culture, another as primarily political
or economic. The question whether the history of our time is pre-eminently signi¬
ficant in an economic sense, and whether our ideologies give us only a derivative
or secondary meaning of it is one which no longer belongs to philosophy, but to
politics, and one which will be solved only by seeking to know whether the eco¬
nomic or ideological scenario fits the facts more perfectly. Philosophy can only
show that it is possible from the starting point of the human condition.

173

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION,
AND SPEECH

WE have seen in the body a unity distinct from that of the scientific
object. We have just discovered, even in its ‘sexual function5, inten¬
tionally and sense-giving powers. In trying to describe the pheno¬
menon of speech and the specific act of meaning, we shall have the
opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional
subject-object dichotomy.

The realization that speech is an originating realm naturally comes
late. Here as everywhere, the relation of having , which can be seen in
the very etymology of the word habit, is at first concealed by relations
belonging to the domain of being, or, as we may equally say, by ontic
relations obtaining within the world.1 The possession of language is
in the first place understood as no more than the actual existence of
‘verbal images’, or traces left in us by words spoken or heard.
Whether these traces are physical, or whether they are imprinted on
an ‘unconscious psychic life’, is of little importance, and in both cases
the conception of language is the same in that there is no ‘speaking
subject’. Whether the stimuli, in accordance with the laws of neuro¬
logical mechanics, touch off excitations capable of bringing about the
articulation of the word, or whether the states of consciousness cause,
by virtue of acquired associations, the appearance of the appropriate

1 This distinction of having and being does not coincide with M. G. Marcel’s
(fare et Avoir), although not incompatible with it. M. Marcel takes having in the
weak sense which the word has when it designates a proprietary relationship (I
have a house, I have a hat) and immediately takes being in the existential sense of
belonging to . . or taking up (I am my body, I am my life). We prefer to take
account of the usage which gives to the term ‘being’ the weak sense of existence
as a thing, or that of predication (the table is, or is big), and which reserves ‘having’
for the relation which the subject bears to the term into which it projects itself (I
have an idea, I have a desire, I have fears). Hence our ‘having’ corresponds
roughly to M. Marcel’s being, and our being to his ‘having’.

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

verbal image, in both cases speech occurs in a circuit of third person
phenomena. There is no speaker, there is a flow of words set in
motion independently of any intention to speak. The meaning of
words is considered to be given with the stimuli or with the states of
consciousness which it is simply a matter of naming; the shape of the
word, as heard or phonetically formed, is given with the cerebral or
mental tracks; speech is not an action and does not show up the inter¬
nal possibilities of the subject: man can speak as the electric lamp can
become incandescent. Since there are elective disturbances which
attack the spoken language to the exclusion of the written one, or
vice versa, and since language can disintegrate into fragments, we
have to conclude that it is built up by a set of independent contribu¬
tions, and that speech in the general sense is an entity of rational
origin.

The theory of aphasia and of language seemed to be undergoing
complete transformation when it became necessary to distinguish
from anarthria,* which affects the articulation of the word, true
aphasia which is inseparable from disturbances affecting intelligence
— and from automatic language, which is in effect a third person
motor phenomenon, an intentional language which is alone relevant
to the majority of cases of aphasia. The individuality of the ‘verbal
image’ was, indeed, dissociated: what the patient has lost, and what
the normal person possesses, is not a certain stock of words, but a
certain way of using them. The same word which remains at the dis¬
posal of the patient in the context of automatic languages escapes him
in that of language unrelated to a purpose— the patient who has no
difficulty in finding the word ‘no’ in answer to the doctor’s questions,
that is when he intends to furnish a denial arising from his present
experience, cannot do so when it is a question of an exercise having no
emotional and vital bearing. There is thus revealed, underlying the
word, an attitude, a function of speech which condition it. The word
could be identified as an instrument of action and as a means of
disinterested designation. Though ‘concrete’ language remained a
third person process, gratuitous language, or authentic denomination,
became a phenomenon of thought, and it is in some disturbance of
thinking that the origin of certain forms of aphasia must be sought.
For example, amnesia concerning names of colours, when related to
the general behaviour of the patient, appeared as a special manifesta¬
tion of a more general trouble. The same patients who cannot name
colours set before them, are equally incapable of classifying them in
the performance of a set task. If, for example, they are asked to sort
out samples according to basic colour, it is immediately noticed that
they do it more slowly and painstakingly than a normal subject: they
* Anarthria : loss of power of articulate speech (Translator’s note).

175

THE BODY

slowly place together the samples to be compared and fail to see at a
glance which ones ‘go together’. Moreover, having correctly as¬
sembled several blue ribbons, they make unaccountable mistakes: if
for example the last blue ribbon was of a pale shade, they carry on
by adding to the collection of ‘blues’ a pale green or pale pink — as if
it were beyond them to stick to the proposed principle of classifica¬
tion, and to consider the samples from the point of view of basic
colour from start to finish of the operation. They have thus become
unable to subsume sense-data under a category, to see immediately
the samples as representatives of the eidos blue. Even when, at the
beginning of the test, they proceed correctly, it is not the conformity
of the samples to an idea which guides them, but the experience of an
immediate resemblance, and hence it comes about that they can
classify the samples only when they have placed them side by side.
The sorting test brings to light in these subjects a fundamental dis¬
order, of which forgetting names of colours is simply another mani¬
festation. For to name a thing is to tear oneself away from its indivi¬
dual and unique characteristics to see it as representative of an
essence or a category, and the fact that the patient cannot identify
the samples is a sign, not that he has lost the verbal image of the
words red or blue, but that he has lost the general ability to subsume
a sense-datum under a category, that he has lapsed back from the
categorial to the concrete attitude.1 These analyses and other similar
ones lead us, it would seem, to the antithesis of the theory of the ver¬
bal image, since language now appears as conditioned by thought.

In fact we shall once again see that there is a kinship between the
empiricist or mechanistic psychologies and the intellectual ist ones,
and the problem of language is not solved by going from one extreme
to the other. A short time ago the reproduction of the word, the
revival of the verbal image, was the essential thing. Now it is no more
than what envelops true denomination and authentic speech, which
is an inner process. And yet these two conceptions are at one in hold¬
ing that the word has no significance. In the first case this is obvious
since the word is not summoned up through the medium of any con¬
cept, and since the given stimuli or ‘states of mind’ call it up in ac¬
cordance with the laws of neurological mechanics or those of associa¬
tion, and that thus the word is not the bearer of its own meaning,
has no inner power, and is merely a psychic, physiological or even
physical phenomenon set alongside others, and thrown up by the
working of an objective causality. It is just the same when we dupli¬
cate denomination with a categorial operation. The word is still
bereft of any effectiveness ofits own, this time because it is only the
external sign of an internal recognition, which could take place
1 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber Farbennamenamnesie.

176

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

without it, and to which it makes no contribution. It is not without
meaning, since behind it there is a categorial operation, but this
meaning is something which it does not have, does not possess, since
it is thought which has a meaning, the word remaining an empty
container. It is merely a phenomenon of articulation, of sound, or
the consciousness of such a phenomenon, but in any case language
is but an external accompaniment of thought. In the first case, we are
on this side of the word as meaningful ; in the second we are beyond
it. In the first there is nobody to speak; in the second, there is cer¬
tainly a subject, but a thinking one, not a speaking one. As far as
speech itself is concerned, intellectualism is hardly any different from
empiricism, and is no better able than the latter to dispense with an
explanation in terms of involuntary action. Once the categorial
operation is performed, the appearance of the word which completes
the process still has to be explained, and this will still be done by
recourse to a physiological or psychic mechanism, since the word is a
passive shell. Thus we refute both intellectualism and empiricism by
simply saying that the word has a meaning.

If speech presupposed thought, if talking were primarily a matter
of meeting the object through a cognitive intention or through a
representation, we could not understand why thought tends towards
expression as towards its completion, why the most familiar thing
appears indeterminate as long as we have not recalled its name, why
the thinking subject himself is in a kind of ignorance of his thoughts
so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken
and written them, as is shown by the example of so many writers
who begin a book without knowing exactly what they are going to
put into it. A thought limited to existing for itself, independently of
the constraints of speech and communication, would no sooner ap¬
pear than it would sink into the unconscious, which means that it
would not exist even for itself. To Kant’s celebrated question, we can
reply that it is indeed part of the experience of thinking, in the sense
that we present our thought to ourselves through internal or external
speech. It does indeed move forward with the instant and, as it were,
in flashes, but we are then left to lay hands on it, and it is through
expression that we make it our own. The denomination of objects
does not follow upon recognition; it is itself recognition. When I fix
my eyes on an object in the half-light, and say: ‘It is a brush’, there
is not in my mind the concept of a brush, under which I subsume the
object, and which moreover is linked by frequent association with the
word ’brush’, but the word bears the meaning, and, by imposing it on
the object, I am conscious of reaching that object. As has often been
said,1 for the child the thing is not known until it is named, the name
1 E.g. Piaget, La Representation du Monde chez /’ Enfant, pp. 60 and ff.

177

THE BODY

is the essence of the thing and resides in it on the same footing as its
colour and its form. For pre-scientific thinking, naming an object is
causing it to exist or changing it: God creates beings by naming
them and magic operates upon them by speaking of them. These
‘mistakes’ would be unexplainable if speech rested on the concept,
for the latter ought always to know itself as distinct from the former,
and to know the former as an external accompaniment. If it is pointed
out in reply that the child learns to know objects through the designa¬
tions of language, that thus, given in the first place as linguistic enti¬
ties, objects receive only secondarily their natural existence, and that
finally the actual existence of a linguistic community accounts for
childish beliefs, this explanation leaves the problem untouched, since,
if the child can know himself as a member of a linguistic community
before knowing himself as thinking about some Nature, it is con¬
ditional upon the subject’s being able to overlook himself as universal
thought and apprehend himself as speech, and on the fact that the
word, far from being the mere sign of objects and meanings, inhabits
things and is the vehicle of meanings. Thus speech, in the speaker,
does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it.1 A
fortiori must it be recognized that the listener receives thought from
speech itself. At first sight, it might appear that speech heard can
bring him nothing: it is he who gives to words and sentences their
meaning, and the very combination of words and sentences is not an
alien import, since it would not be understood if it did not encounter
in the listener the ability spontaneously to effect it. Here, as every¬
where, it seems at first sight true that consciousness can find in its
experience only what it has itself put there. Thus the experience of
communication would appear to be an illusion. A consciousness con¬
structs — for x — that linguistic mechanism which will provide another
consciousness with the chance of having the same thoughts, but
nothing really passes between them. Yet, the problem being how, to
all appearances, consciousness learns something, the solution cannot
consist in saying that it knows everything in advance. The fact is that
we have the power to understand over and above what we may have
spontaneously thought. People can speak to us only a language which
we already understand, each word of a difficult text awakens in us
thoughts which were ours beforehand, but these meanings sometimes
combine to form new thought which recasts them all, and we are
transported to the heart of the matter, we find the source. Here there
is nothing comparable to the solution of a problem, where we dis-

1 There is, of course, every reason to distinguish between an authentic speech,
which formulates for the first time, and second-order expression, speech about
speech, which makes up the general run of empirical language. Only the first is
identical with thought.

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

cover an unknown quantity through its relationship with known ones.
For the problem can be solved only if it is determinate, that is, if the
cross-checking of the data provides the unknown quantity with one
or more definite values. In understanding others, the problem is al¬
ways indeterminate* because only the solution will bring the data re¬
trospectively to light as convergent, only the central theme of a
philosophy, once understood, endows the philosopher’s writings with
the value of adequate signs. There is, then, a taking up of others’
thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think ac¬
cording to others2 which enriches our own thoughts. Here the mean¬
ing of words must be finally induced by the words themselves, or
more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of
deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech. And
as, in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words
through their place in a context of action, and by taking part in a
communal life— in the same way an as yet imperfectly understood
piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain
’style’— either a Spinozist, criticist or phenomenological one—' which
is the first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by
feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone
and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language conveys its
own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind. A
school of music or painting which is at first not understood, eventu¬
ally, by its own action, creates its own public, if it really says some¬
thing; that is, it does so by secreting its own meaning. In the case of
prose' or poetry, the power of the spoken word is less obvious, be¬
cause we have the illusion of already possessing within ourselves, in
the shape of the common property meaning of words, what is re¬
quired for the understanding of any text whatsoever. The obvious
fact is, however, that the colours of the palette or the crude sounds of
instruments, as presented to us in natural perception, are insufficient
to provide the musical sense of music, or the pictorial sense of a
painting. But, in fact, it is less the case that the sense of a literary
work is provided by the common property meaning of words, than
that it contributes to changing that accepted meaning. There is thus,
either in the man who listens or reads, ot in the one who speaks or
writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by
intellectualism.

To realize this, we must turn back to the phenomenon of speech

1 Again, what we say here applies only to first-hand speech— that of the child
uttering its first word, of the lover revealing his feelings, of the ‘first man who
spoke’, or of the writer and philosopher who reawaken primordial experience
anterior to all traditions.

* Nachdenken, nachvollziehen of Husserl, Ursprung der Geometrie, pp. 212 and fit.

179

THE BODY

and reconsider ordinary descriptions which immobilize thought and
speech, and make anything other than external relations between
them inconceivable. We must recognize first of all that thought, in
the speaking subject, is not a representation, that is, that it does not
expressly posit objects or relations. The orator does not think before
speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thought. In the
same way the listener does not form concepts on the basis of signs.
The orator’s ‘thought’ is empty while he is speaking and, when a
text is read to us, provided that it is read with expression, we have no
thought marginal to the text itself, for the words fully occupy our
mind and exactly fulfil our expectations, and we feci the necessity of
the speech. Although we are unable to predict its course, we are pos¬
sessed by it. The end of the speech or text will be the lifting of a spell.
It is at this stage that thoughts on the speech or text will be able to
arise. Previously the speech was improvised and the text understood
without the intervention of a single thought ; the sense was everywhere
present, and nowhere posited for its own sake. The speaking subject
does not think of the sense of what he is saying, nor does he visualize
the words which he is using. To know a word or a language is, as we
have said, not to be able to bring into play any pre-established
nervous network. But neither is it to retain some ‘pure recollection’
of the word, some faded perception. The Bergsonian dualism of
habit-memory and pure recollection does not account for the near-
presence of the words I know: they are behind me, like things behind
my back, or like the city’s horizon round my house, I reckon with
them or rely on them, but without having any ‘verbal image’. In so
far as they persist within me, it is rather as does the Freudian Imago
which is much less the representation of a former perception than a
highly specific emotional essence, which is yet generalized, and de¬
tached from its empirical origins. What remains to me of the word
once learnt is its style as constituted by its formation and sound.
What we have said earlier about the ‘representation of movement’
must be repeated concerning the verbal image: I do not need to
visualize external space and my own body in order to move one with¬
in the other. It is enough that they exist for me, and that they form
a certain field of action spread around me. In the same way I do not
need to visualize the word in order to know and pronounce it. It is
enough that I possess its articulatory and acoustic style as one of the
modulations, one of the possible uses of my body. I reach back for
the word as my hand reaches towards the part of my body which is
being pricked; the word has a certain location in my linguistic world,
and is part of my equipment. I have only one means of representing
it, which is uttering it, just as the artist has only one means of repre¬
senting the work on which he is engaged : by doing it. When I imagine

ISO

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

Peter absent, I am not aware of contemplating an image of Peter
numerically distinct from Peter himself. However far away he is, I
visualize him in the world, and my power of imagining is nothing but
the persistence of my world around me.1 To say that I imagine Peter
is to say that I bring about the pseudo-presence of Peter by putting
into operation the ‘Peter-behaviour-pattern’. Just as Peter in imagina¬
tion is only one of the modalities of my being in the world, so the
verbal image is only one of the modalities of my phonetic gesticula¬
tion, presented with many others in the all-embracing consciousness
of my body. This is obviously what Bergson means when he talks
about a ‘motor framework’ of recollection, but if pure representa¬
tions of the past take their place in this framework, it is not clear why
they should need it to become actual once more. The part played by
the body in memory is comprehensible only if memory is, not only
the constituting consciousness of the past, but an effort to reopen
time on the basis of the implications contained in the present, and if
the body, as our permanent means of ‘taking up attitudes’ and thus
constructing pseudo-presents, is the medium of our communication
with time as well as with space.2 The body’s function in remembering
is that same function of projection which we have already met in
starting to move: the body converts a certain motor essence into
vocal form, spreads out the articulatory style of a word into audible
phenomena, and arrays the former attitude, which is resumed, into
the panorama of the past, projecting an intention to move into actual
movement, because the body is a power of natural expression.

These considerations enable us to restore to the act of speaking its
true physiognomy. In the first place speech is not the ‘sign’ of thought,
if by this we understand a phenomenon which heralds another as

1 Sartre, V Imagination, p. 148.

* , when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt
to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the dark¬
ness, things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would
make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of
its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture
stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living.
Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered
it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the
unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive
room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. . . . My body,
the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression
which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the
glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an
um and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Sienna marble
in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt’s house, in those far-distant days
which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly defined.’
(Proust, Swann's Way, I, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Chatto and Windus, pp.
5-6.)

181

THE BODY

smoke betrays fire. Speech and thought would admit of this external
relation only if they were both thematically given, whereas in fact they
are intervolved, the sense being held within the word, and the word
being the external existence of the sense. Nor can we concede, as is
commonly done, that speech is a mere means of fixation, nor yet
that it is the envelope and clothing of thought. Why should it be
easier to recall words or phrases than thoughts, if the alleged verbal
images need to be reconstructed on every occasion? And why should
thought seek to duplicate itself or clothe itself in a succession of utter¬
ances, if the latter do not carry and contain within themselves their
own meaning? Words cannot be ‘strongholds of thought’, nor can
thought seek expression, unless words are in themselves a compre¬
hensible text, and unless speech possesses a power of significance
entirely its own. The word and speech must somehow cease to be a
way of designating things or thoughts, and become the presence of
that thought in the phenomenal world, and, moreover, not its cloth¬
ing but its token or its body. There must be, as psychologists say, a
‘linguistic concept’ (Sprachbegriff)1 or a word concept ( Wortbegriff ),
a ‘central inner experience, specifically verbal, thanks to which the
sound, heard, uttered, read or written, becomes a linguistic fact’.2
Certain patients can read a text, ‘putting expression into it’, without,
however, understanding it. This is because the spoken or written
words carry a top coating of meaning which sticks to them and which
presents the thought as a style, an affective value, a piece of existen¬
tial mimicry, rather than as a conceptual statement. We find here,
beneath the conceptual meaning of the words, an existential meaning
which is not only rendered by them, but which inhabits them, and is
inseparable from them. The greatest service done by expression is
not to commit to writing ideas which might be lost. A writer hardly
ever re-reads his own works, and great works leave in us at a first
reading all that we shall ever subsequently get out of them. The pro¬
cess of expression, when it is successful, does not merely leave for the
reader and the writer himself a kind of reminder, it brings the mean¬
ing into existence as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to
life in an organism of words, establishing it in the writer or the reader
as a new sense organ, opening a new field or a new dimension to our
experience. This power of expression is well known in the arts, for
example in music. The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable
from the sounds which are its vehicle: before we have heard it no
analysis enables us to anticipate it; once the performance is over, we
shall, in our intellectual analyses of the music, be unable to do any¬
thing but carry ourselves back to the moment of experiencing it.

1 Cassirer, Philosophic der symbolischen Ferment HI, p. 383.

2 Goldstein, V Analyse de Vaphasie et Vessence du langage, p. 459.

182

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

During the performance, the notes are not only the ‘signs’ of the
sonata, but it is there through them, it enters into them.1 In the same
way the actress becomes invisible, and it is Phaedra who appears.
The meaning swallows up the signs, and Phaedra has so completely
taken possession of Berma that her passion as Phaedra appears the
apotheosis of ease and naturalness.2 Aesthetic expression confers on
what it expresses an existence in itself, installs it in nature as a thing
perceived and accessible to all, or conversely plucks the signs them¬
selves — the person of the actor, or the colours and canvas of the
painter — from their empirical existence and bears them off into an¬
other world. No one will deny that here the process of expression
brings the meaning into being or makes it effective, and does not
merely translate it. It is no different, despite what may appear to be
the case, with the expression of thoughts in speech. Thought is no
‘internal’ thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of
words. What misleads us in this connection, and causes us to believe
in a thought which exists for itself prior to expression, is thought
already constituted and expressed, which we can silently recall to
ourselves, and through which we acquire the illusion of an inner life.
But in reality this supposed silence is alive with words, this inner life
is an inner language. ‘Pure’ thought reduces itself to a certain void of
consciousness, to a momentary desire. The new sense-giving intention
knows itself only by donning already available meanings, the out¬
come of previous acts of expression. The available meanings sud¬
denly link up in accordance with an unknown law, and once and for
all a fresh cultural entity has taken on an existence. Thought and ex¬
pression, then, are simultaneously constituted, when our cultural
store is put at the service of this unknown law, as our body suddenly
lends itself to some new gesture in the formation of habit. The spoken
word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning in the same way
as the gesture contains its. This is what makes communication pos¬
sible. In order that I may understand the words of another person, it
is clear that his vocabulary and syntax must be ‘already known’ to
me. But that does not mean that words do their work by arousing in
me ‘representations’ associated with them, and which in aggregate
eventually reproduce in me the original ‘representation’ of the
speaker. What I communicate with primarily is not ‘representations’
or thought, but a speaking subject, with a certain style of being and
with the ‘world’ at which he directs his aim. Just as the sense-giving
intention which has set in motion the other person’s speech is not an
explicit thought, but a certain lack which is asking to be made good,
so my taking up of this intention is not a process of thinking on my

1 Proust, Swann’s Way , II, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, p. 185.

2 Proust, The Guermantes Way , I, pp. 55 and ff.

183

THE BODY

part, but a synchronizing change of my own existence, a transforma¬
tion of my being. We live in a world where speech is an institution .
For all these many commonplace utterances, we possess within our¬
selves ready-made meanings. They arouse in us only second order
thoughts ; these in turn are translated into other words which demand
from us no real effort of expression and will demand from our hearers
no effort of comprehension. Thus language and the understanding of
language apparently raise no problems. The linguistic and intersub-
jective world no longer surprises us, we no longer distinguish it from
the world itself, and it is within a world already spoken and speaking
that we think. We become unaware of the contingent element in ex¬
pression and communication, whether it be in the child learning to
speak, or in the writer saying and thinking something for the first
time, in short, in all who transform a certain kind of silence into
speech. It is, however, quite clear that constituted speech, as it oper¬
ates in daily life, assumes that the decisive step of expression has been
taken. Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to
go back to that origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter
of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe
the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture,
and its meaning, a world.

Modern psychology1 has demonstrated that the spectator does not
look within himself into his personal experience for the meaning of
the gestures which he is witnessing. Faced with an angry or threaten¬
ing gesture, I have no need, in order to understand it, to recall the
feelings which I myself experienced when I used these gestures on my
own account. I am not well able to visualize, in my mind’s eye, the
outward signs of anger, so that a decisive factor is missing for any
association by resemblance or reasoning by analogy, and what is
more, I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic fact
hidden behind the gesture, I read anger into it. The gesture does not
make me think of anger, it is anger itself. However, the meaning of
the gesture is not perceived as the colour of the carpet, for example,
is perceived. If it were given to me as a thing, it is not clear why my
understanding of gestures should for the most part be confined to
human ones. I do not ‘understand’ the sexual pantomime of the dog,
still less of the cockchafer or the praying mantis. T do not even under¬
stand the expression of the emotions in primitive people or in circles
too unlike the ones in which I move. If a child happens to witness
sexual intercourse, it may understand it although it has no experience
of desire and of the bodily attitudes which translate it. The sexual
scene will be merely an unfamiliar and disturbing spectacle, without
meaning unless the child has reached the stage of sexual maturity at
1 For example, M. Scheler, Nature et Formes de la Sympathies pp. 347 and ff.

184

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

which this behaviour becomes possible for it. It is true that often
knowledge of other people lights up the way to self-knowledge : the
spectacle outside him reveals to the child the meaning of its own im¬
pulses, by providing them with an aim. The example would pass un¬
noticed if it did not coincide with the inner possibilities of the child.
The sense of the gestures is not given, but understood, that is, seized
upon by an act on the spectator’s part. The whole difficulty is to
conceive this act clearly without confusing it with a cognitive opera¬
tion. The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about
through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of
my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people.
It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine
his. The gesture which I witness outlines an intentional object. This
object is genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers
of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it. The gesture presents
itself to me as a question, bringing certain perceptible bits of the
world to my notice, and inviting my concurrence in them. Com¬
munication is achieved when my conduct identifies this path with its
own. There is mutual confirmation between myself and others. Here
we must rehabilitate the experience of others which has been dis¬
torted by intellectualist analyses, as we shall have to rehabilitate the
perceptual experience of the thing. When I perceive a thing, a fire¬
place for example, it is not the concordance of its various aspects
which leads me to t)'elieve in the existence of the fireplace as the flat
projection and collective significance of all these perspectives. On the
contrary I perceive the thing in its own self-evident completeness and
this is what gives me the assurance that, in the course of perceptual
experience, I shall be presented with an indefinite set of concordant
views. The identity of the thing through perceptual experience is only
another aspect of the identity of one’s own body throughout ex¬
ploratory movements; thus they are the same in kind as each other.
Like the body image, the fireplace is a system of equivalents not
founded on the recognition of some law, but on the experience of a
bodily presence. I become involved in things with my body, they
co-exist with me as an incarnate subject, and this life among things
has nothing in common with the elaboration of scientifically con¬
ceived objects. In the same way, I do not understand the gestures of
others by some act of intellectual interpretation; communication be¬
tween consciousnesses is not based on the common meaning of their
respective experiences, for it is equally the basis of that meaning. The
act by which I lend myself to the spectacle must be recognized as
irreducible to anything else. I join it in a kind of blind recognition
which precedes the intellectual working out and clarification of the
meaning. Successive generations 'understand’ and perform sexual

185

THE BODY

gestures, such as the caress, before the philosopher1 makes its intel¬
lectual significance clear, which is that we lock within itself a passive
body, enwrap it in a pleasurable lethargy, thus imposing a temporary
respite upon the continual drive which projects it into things and
towards others. It is through my body that I understand other people,
just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things’. The meaning of
a gesture thus ‘understood’ is not behind it, it is intermingled with
the structure of the world outlined by the gesture, and which I take
up on my own account. It is arrayed all over the gesture itself— as, in
perceptual experience, the significance of the fireplace does not lie
beyond the perceptible spectacle, namely the fireplace itself as my
eyes and movements discover it in the world.

The linguistic gesture, like all the rest, delineates its own meaning.
This idea seems surprising at first, yet one is forced to accept it if one
wishes to understand the origin of language, always an insistent prob¬
lem, although psychologists and linguistics both question its validity
in the name of positive knowledge. It seems in the first place impos¬
sible to concede to either words or gestures an immanent meaning,
because the gesture is limited to showing a certain relationship be¬
tween man and the perceptible world, because this world is presented
to the spectator by natural perception, and because in this way the
intentional object is offered to the spectator at the same time as the
gesture itself. Verbal ‘gesticulation’, on the other hand, aims at a
mental setting which is not given to everybody, and which it is its task
to communicate. But here what nature does not provide, cultural
background does. Available meanings, in other words former acts of
expression, establish between speaking subjects a common world, to
which the words being actually uttered in their novelty refer as does
the gesture to the perceptible world. And the meaning of speech is
nothing other than the way in which it handles this linguistic world
or in which it plays modulations on the keyboard of acquired mean¬
ings. I seize it in an undivided act which is as short as a cry. It is true
that the problem has been merely shifted one stage further back: how
did the available meanings themselves come to be constituted ? Once
language is formed, it is conceivable that speech may have meaning,
like the gesture, against the mental background held in common. But
do syntactical forms and vocabulary, which are here presupposed,
carry their meaning within themselves? One can see what there is in
common between the gesture and its meaning, for example in the
case of emotional expression and the emotions themselves : the smile,
the relaxed face, gaiety of gesture really have in them the rhythm of
action, the mode of being in the world which are joy itself. On the
other hand, is not the link between the word sign and its meaning
1 Here J. P. Sartre, L'P.tre et le Neant, pp. 453 and ff.

186

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

quite accidental, a fact demonstrated by the existence of a number of
languages? And was not the communication of the elements of lan¬
guage between the ‘first man to speak’ and the second necessarily of
an entirely different kind from communication through gesture ? This
is what is commonly expressed by saying that gesture or emotional
pantomime are ‘natural signs’, and the word a ‘natural convention’.
But conventions are a late form of relationship between men; they
presuppose an earlier means of communication, and language must
be put back into this current of intercourse. If we consider only the
conceptual and delimiting meaning of words, it is true that the verbal
form — with the exception of endings — appears arbitrary. But it would
no longer appear so if we took into account the emotional content of
the word, which we have called above its ‘gestural’ sense, which is
all-important in poetry, for example. It would then be found that the
words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of ‘singing’ the world,
and that their function is to represent things not, as the naive ono¬
matopoeic theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but
because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence.
If it were possible, in any vocabulary, to disregard what is attribut¬
able to the mechanical laws of phonetics, to the influences of other
languages, the rationalization of grammarians, and assimilatory pro¬
cesses, we should probably discover in the original form of each lan¬
guage a somewhat restricted system of expression, but such as would
make it not entirely arbitrary, if we designate night by the word
‘nuit’, to use ‘ldmiere’ for light. The predominance of vowels in one
language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syn¬
tactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions for
the expression of one and the same idea, but several ways for the
human body to sing the world’s praises and in the last resort to live
it. Hence the full meaning of a language is never translatable into
another. We may speak several languages, but one of them always
remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a
language, it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses
one’s own, and one never does belong to two worlds at once.1 If

1 ‘In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to
imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look
at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the
same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.
Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another
faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like
Mohammed’s coffin in our legend. . . . Such detachment came at times to a man
exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on
mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down
critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes
these selves would converse in the void ; and then madness was very near, as I

o 187

THE BODY

there is such a thing as universal thought, it is achieved by taking up
the effort towards expression and communication in one single
language, and accepting all its ambiguities, all the suggestions and
overtones of meaning of which a linguistic tradition is made up, and
which are the exact measure of its power of expression. A conven¬
tional algorism — which moreover is meaningful only in relation to
language — will never express anything but nature without man.
Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no conventional signs, standing
as the simple notation of a thought pure and clear in itself, there are
only words into which the history of a whole language is compressed,
and which effect communication with no absolute guarantee, dogged
as they are by incredible linguistic hazards. We think that language
is more transparent than music because most of the time we remain
within the bounds of constituted language, we provide ourselves with
available meanings, and in our definitions we are content, like the
dictionary, to explain meanings in terms of each other. The meaning
of a sentence appears intelligible throughout, detachable from the
sentence and finitely self-subsistent in an intelligible world, because
we presuppose as given all those exchanges, owed to the history of the
language, which contribute to determining its sense. In music, on the
other hand, no vocabulary is presupposed, the meaning appears as
linked to the empirical presence of the sounds, and that is why music
strikes us as dumb. But in fact, as we have said, the clearness of lan¬
guage stands out from an obscure background, and if we carry our
research far enough we shall eventually find that language is equally
uncommunicative of anything other than itself, that its meaning is
inseparable from it. We need, then, to seek the first attempts at lan¬
guage in the emotional gesticulation whereby man superimposes on
the given world the world according to man. There is here nothing
resembling the famous naturalistic conceptions which equate the
artificial sign with the natural one, and try to reduce language to
emotional expression. The artificial sign is not reducible to the natural
one, because in man there is no natural sign, and in assimilating
language to emotional expressions, we leave untouched its specific
quality, if it is true that emotion, viewed as a variation of our being
in the world, is contingent in relation to the mechanical resources
contained in our body, and shows the same power of giving shape to
stimuli and situations which is at its most striking at the level of
language. It would be legitimate to speak of ‘natural signs’ only if
the anatomical organization of our body produced a correspondence

believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once
of two customs, two educations, two environments.’ T. E. Lawrence, The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom , Jonathan Cape, pp. 31-2.

188

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

between specific gestures and given ‘states of mind’. The fact is that
the behaviour associated with anger or love is not the same in a
Japanese and an Occidental. Or, to be more precise, the difference
of behaviour corresponds to a difference in the emotions themselves.
It is not only the gesture which is contingent in relation to the body’s
organization, it is the manner itself in which we meet the situation
and live it. The angry Japanese smiles, the westerner goes red and
stamps his foot or else goes pale and hisses his words. It is not
enough for two conscious subjects to have the same organs and
nervous system for the same emotions to produce in both the same
signs. What is important is how they use their bodies, the simul¬
taneous patterning of body and world in emotion. The psycho-
physiological equipment leaves a great variety of possibilities open,
and there is no more here than in the realm of instinct a human
nature finally and immutably given. The use a man is to make of his
body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological
entity. It is no more natural, and no less conventional, to shout in
anger or to kiss in love1 than to call a table ‘a table’. Feelings and
passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which, like
paternity, seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in
reality institutions.2 It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower
layer of behaviour which one chooses to call ‘natural’, followed by a
manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manu¬
factured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not
a word, not a form of behaviour which does not owe something to
purely biological being — and which at the same time does not elude
the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behaviour to
deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage
and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.
Already the mere presence of a living being transforms the physical
world, bringing to view here ‘food’, there a ‘hiding place’, and giving
to ‘stimuli’ a sense which they have not hitherto possessed. A fortiori
does this apply to the presence of a man in the animal world. Be¬
haviour creates meanings which are transcendent in relation to the
anatomical apparatus, and yet immanent to the behaviour as such,
since it communicates itself and is understood. It is impossible to
draw up an inventory of this irrational power which creates meanings
and conveys them. Speech is merely one particular case of it.

1 tt is well known that the kiss is not one of the traditional customs of Japan.

2 Paternity is unknown to the Trobriand Islanders. Children are brought up
under the authority of the maternal uncle. A husband, on his return from a long
jou rney, is delighted to find new children in his home. He looks after them, watches
over them and cherishes them as if they were his own children. Malinowski, The
Father in Primitive Psychology , quoted by Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals ,
Allen and Unwin, pp. 20 and ff.

189

THE BODY

What is true, however — and justifies the view that we ordinarily
take of language, as being in a peculiar category — is that, alone of
all expressive processes, speech is able to settle into a sediment and
constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships. This fact
cannot be explained by pointing out that speech can be recorded on
paper, whereas gestures or forms of behaviour are transmitted only
by direct imitation. For music too can be written down, and, although
there is in music something in the nature of an initiation into the
tradition, although, that is, it would probably be impossible to
graduate to atonal music without passing through classical music, yet
every composer starts his task at the beginning, having a new world
to deliver, whereas in the realm of speech, each writer is conscious of
taking as his objective the same world as has already been dealt with
by other writers. The worlds of Balzac and Stendhal are not like
planets without communication with each other, for speech implants
the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort. It loses
sight of itself as a contingent fact, and takes to resting upon itself;
this is, as we have seen, what provides us with the ideal of thought
without words, whereas the idea of music without sounds is ridicu¬
lous. Even if this is pushing the principle beyond its limits and reduc¬
ing things to the absurd, even if a linguistic meaning can never be
delivered of its inherence in some word or other, the fact remains that
the expressive process in the case of speech can be indefinitely reiter¬
ated, that it is possible to speak about speech whereas it is impossible
to paint about painting, and finally that every philosopher has
dreamed of a form of discourse which would supersede all others,
whereas the painter or the musician does not hope to exhaust all
possible painting or music. Thus there is a privileged position ac¬
corded to Reason. But if we want to understand it clearly, we
must begin by putting thought back among the phenomena of
expression.

This conception of language carries further the best and most re¬
cent analysis of aphasia, of which we have so far made use of only a
part. We have seen, to start with, that after an empiricist phase, the
theory of aphasia, since Pierre Marie, seemed to move over to intel-
lectualism, and that, in linguistic disturbances, it invoked the ‘repre¬
sentative function’ (. Darstellungsfunktion ) or ‘catcgorial’ activity1 and
that it based speech on thought. In reality, it is not towards a new
intellectualism that the theory moves. Whether its authors are aware
of it or not, they are trying to formulate what we shall call an existen¬
tial theory of aphasia, that is, a theory which treats thought and ob¬
jective language as two manifestations of that fundamental activity

1 Notions of this kind appear in the works of Head, van Woerkom, Bouman
and Grunbaum, and Goldstein.

190

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

whereby man projects himself towards a ‘world’.1 Take, for example,
amnesia relating to names of colours. It is demonstrated, by sorting
tests, that the sufferer from amnesia has lost the general ability to
subsume colours under a category, and to this same cause is attri¬
buted the verbal deficiency. But if we go back to concrete descrip¬
tions we notice that the categorial activity, before being a thought or
a form of knowledge, is a certain manner of relating oneself to the
world, and, correspondingly, a style or shape of experience. In a
normal subject, the perception of a heap of samples is organized in
virtue of the task set : ‘The colours belonging to the same category as
the model sample stand out against the background of the rest’,2 all
the reds, for example, forming a group, and the subject has now only
to split up this group in order to bring together all the samples which
belong to it. For the patient, on the other hand, each of the samples
is confined within its individual existence. Against the formation of
any group according to a given principle, they bring a sort of vis¬
cosity or inertia. When two objectively similar colours are presented
to the patient, they do not necessarily appear similar: it may happen
that in one the basic shade is dominant, in the other the degree of
lightness or warmth.3 We can ourselves experience something similar
by taking up, before a pile of samples, an attitude of passive percep¬
tion: the identical colours group themselves before our eyes, but
those colours which are merely rather alike establish only vague
mutual relations, ‘the heap seems unstable, shifting, and we observe
an incessant alteration in it, a kind of contest between several pos¬
sible groupings of colours according to different points of view’.4 We
are reduced to the immediate experience of relationships (Koharenzer-
lebnis , Erlebnis des Passens) and such is probably the experience of
the patient. We were wrong to say that he cannot abide by a given
principle of classification, but goes from one to the other: in reality
he never adopts any.6 The disturbance touches ‘the way in which the
colours group themselves for the observer, the way in which the visual
field is put together from the point of view of colours’.6 It is not only
the thought or knowledge, but the very experience of colours which
is in question. We might say with another author that normal ex¬
perience involves ‘circles’ or ‘vortices’ within which each element is
representative of all others and carries, as it were, ‘vectors’ which

1 Griinbaum, for example ( Aphasie und Motorik) shows both that aphasic dis¬
turbances are general and that they are motor, in other words he makes motility
into an original mode of intentionality or meaning (cf. above, pp. 227-8), which
amounts to conceiving man, no longer in terms of consciousness, but in terms of
existence.

2 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber Farbennamenamnesie , p. 151.

3 Ibid., p. 149. 4 Ibid., pp. 151-2.

5 Ibid., p. 150. 6 Ibid., p. 162.

191

THE BODY

link it to them. In the patient, ‘this life is enclosed in narrower limits,
and, compared to the normal subject’s perceived world, it moves in
smaller and more restricted circles. A movement which has its origin
on the periphery of the vortex no longer spreads immediately as far
as its centre, but remains, so to speak, within the stimulated area or
may be transmitted to its immediate surrounding, but no further.
More comprehensive units of meaning can no longer be built up with¬
in the perceived world. . . . Here again, each sense impression is
provided with a “sense-vector”, but these vectors have no common
direction, for, being no longer directed towards main determinate
centres, they diverge much more than in the normal person.’1 Such
is the disturbance of ‘thought’ discoverable at the root of amnesia; it
can be seen that it concerns not so much the judgement as the setting
of experience in which the judgement has its source, not so much
spontaneity as the footing which spontaneity has in the perceptible
world, and our ability to discern in it any intention whatsoever. In
Kantian terms: it affects not so much the understanding as the pro¬
ductive imagination. The categorial act is therefore not an ultimate
fact, it builds itself up into a certain ‘attitude’ ( Einstellung ). It is on
this attitude, moreover, that speech is based, so that there can be no
question of making language rest upon pure thought. ‘Categorial
behaviour and the possession of meaningful language express one
and the same fundamental form of behaviour. Neither can be a cause
or effect of the other.’2 In the first place, thought is not an effect of
language. It is true that certain patients,3 being unable to group
colours by comparing them to a given sample, succeed through the
intermediary of language : they name the colour of the exemplar and
subsequently collect together all the samples which that name fits
without looking back at the exemplar. It is true also that abnormal
children4 classify even different colours together if they have been
taught to call them by the same name. But these are precisely abnor¬
mal procedures; they do not express the essential relationship be¬
tween language and thought, but the pathological or accidental rela-
ship of language and thought both cut off from their living signifi¬
cance. Indeed, many patients are able to repeat the names of the
colours without being any more capable of classifying them. In cases
of amnesic aphasia, ‘it cannot, therefore, be the lack of the word
taken in itself which makes categorial behaviour difficult or impos¬
sible. Words must have lost something which normally belongs to
them and which fits them for use in relation to categorial behaviour / a

1 E. Cassirer, Philosophic der symbolischen Formed t T. Ill, p. 258.

2 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber Farbemamenamnesiet p. 158.

3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

192

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

What have they lost? Their notional significance? Must we say that
the concept has been withdrawn from them, thus making thought
the cause of language? But clearly, when the word loses its meaning,
it is modified down to its sensible aspect, it is emptied ' 1 The patient
suffering from amnesia, to whom a colour name is given, and who is
asked to choose a corresponding sample, repeats the name as if he
expected something to come of it. But the name is now useless to him,
it tells him nothing more, it is alien and absurd, as are for us names
which we go on repeating for too long a time.2 Patients for whom
words have lost their meaning sometimes retain in the highest degree
the ability to associate ideas.3 The name, therefore, has not become
separated from former ‘associations’, it has suffered deterioriation,
like some inanimate body. The link between the word and its living
meaning is not an external link of association, the meaning inhabits
the word, and language ‘is not an external accompaniment to intellec¬
tual processes’.4 We are therefore led to recognize a gestural or exis¬
tential significance in speech, as we have already said. Language cer¬
tainly has an inner content, but this is not self-subsistent and self-
conscious thought. What then does language express, if it does not
express thoughts? It presents or rather it is the subject’s taking up of
a position in the world of his meanings. The term ‘world’ here is not
a manner of speaking: it means that the ‘mental’ or cultural life
borrows its structures from natural life and that the thinking subject
must have its basis in the subject incarnate. The phonetic ‘gesture’
brings about, both for the speaking subject and for his hearers, a
certain structural co-ordination of experience, a certain modulation
of existence, exactly as a pattern of my bodily behaviour endows the
objects around me with a certain significance both for me and for
others. The meaning of the gesture is not contained in it like some
physical or physiological phenomenon. The meaning of the word is
not contained in the word as a sound. But the human body is defined
in terms of its property of appropriating, in an indefinite series of dis¬
continuous acts, significant cores which transcend and transfigure its
natural powers. This act of transcendence is first encountered in the
acquisition of a pattern of behaviour, then in the mute communica¬
tion of gesture: it is through the same power that the body opens
itself to some new kind of conduct and makes it understood to exter¬
nal witnesses. Here and there a system of definite powers is suddenly

1 Gelb and Goldstein, Vber Farbennamenamnesie , p. 158.

2 Ibid.

3 One sees them faced with a given sample (red), recalling some object of the
same colour (strawberry), and from there rediscovering the name of the colour
(red strawberry, red). Ibid., p. 177.

4 Ibid., p. 158.

193

THE BODY

decentralized, broken up and reorganized under a fresh law unknown
to the subject or to the external witness, and one which reveals itself
to them at the very moment at which the process occurs. For example,
the knitting of the brows intended, according to Darwin, to protect
the eye from the sun, or the narrowing of the eyes to enable one to
see sharply, become component parts of the human act of medita¬
tion, and convey this to an observer. Language, in its turn, presents
no different a problem: a contraction of the throat, a sibilant emis¬
sion of air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of bringing
the body into play suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figura¬
tive significance which is conveyed outside us. This is neither more
nor less miraculous than the emergence of love from desire, or that
of gesture from the unco-ordinated movements of infancy. For the
miracle to come about, phonetic ‘gesticulation’ must use an alphabet
of already acquired meanings, the word-gesture must be performed
in a certain setting common to the speakers, just as the comprehen¬
sion of other gestures presupposes a perceived world common to all,
in which each one develops and spreads out its meaning. But this
condition is not sufficient: speech puts up a new sense, if it is authen¬
tic speech, just as gesture endows the object for the first time with
human significance, if it is an initiating gesture. Moreover signifi¬
cances now acquired must necessarily have been new once. We must
therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power
of giving significance — that is, both of apprehending and conveying
a meaning — by which man transcends himself towards a new form
of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought,
through his body and his speech.

When authors try to bring the analysis of aphasia to its conclusion
in some general conception of language* 1 they can more clearly be
seen forsaking the intellectualist language which they adopted after
Pierre Marie and in reaction against the conceptions of Broca. It
cannot be said of speech either that it is an ‘operation of intelligence’,
or that it is a ‘motor phenomenon’: it is wholly motility and wholly
intelligence. What establishes its inherence in the body is the fact
that linguistic deficiencies cannot be reduced to a unity, and that the
primary disturbances affect sometimes the body of the word, the
material instrument of verbal expression — sometimes the word’s
physiognomy, the verbal intention, the kind of group image on the
basis of which we succeed in saying or writing down a word exactly —

sometimes stag- writes-

call the verbal concept — and sometimes the structure of the whole
experience, not merely the linguistic experience, as in the case of
amnesic aphasia examined above. Speech, then, rests upon a strati-

1 Cf. Goldstein, V Analyse de Vaphasie et Vessence du langage.

194

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

fication of powers relatively capable of being isolated. But at the
same time it is impossible to find anywhere a linguistic disturbance
which is ‘purely motor’ and which does not to some extent impinge
upon the significance of language. In pure alexia,* if the subject can
no longer recognize the letters of a word, it is through inability to
pattern the visual data, or constitute the word’s structure, or appre¬
hend its visual significance. In motor aphasia, the list of words lost
and preserved does not correspond to their objective characteristics
(length or complexity), but to their value from the subject’s point of
view : the patient is unable to pronounce, in isolation, a letter or word
within a familiar motor series, through being incapable of differen¬
tiating between the ‘figure’ and ‘background’ and freely conferring
upon a certain word or letter the value of a figure. Articulatory and
syntactical accuracy always stand in inverse ratio to each other,
which shows that the articulation of a word is not a merely motor
phenomenon, but that it draws upon the same energies which orga¬
nize the syntactical order. When disturbances of verbal intention are
present, as in the case of literal paraphasia f in which letters are omit¬
ted, displaced, or added, and in which the rhythm of the word is
changed, it is, a fortiori, clearly not a question of a destruction of
engrains,! but of the reduction to a common level of figure and
background, of a powerlessness to structurize the word and grasp its
articulatory physiognomy.1

If we are to summarize these two sets of observations, we shall
have to say that any linguistic operation presupposes the apprehen¬
sion of a significance, but that the significance in both cases is, as it
were, specialized: there are different layers of significance, from the
visual to the conceptual by way of the verbal concept. These two
ideas will never be simultaneously understood unless we cease to
vacillate between the notions of ‘motility’ and ‘intelligence’, and un¬
less we discover a third notion which enables us to integrate them, a

* Alexia: Loss of power to grasp meaning of written or printed words and
sentences : word-blindness (Translator's note).

t Paraphrasia: jargon; form of aphasia in which patient has lost power of
speaking correctly, though words are heard and comprehended : he substitutes
one word for another, and jumbles his words and sentences in such a way as to
make his speech unintelligible (Translator's note).

t Engrain: traces left by stimuli on protoplasm of animal or plant (Translator’s
note).

1 Goldstein, V Analyse de Vaphasie etV essence du langage , p. 460. Goldstein here
agrees with Griinbaum {Aphasie und Motorik) in going beyond the situation in
which one is faced with the choice between the traditional conception (Broca)
and the modern works (Head). Griinbaum's complaint against the moderns is
that they do not ‘give absolute priority to motor exteriorization, and the psycho¬
physical structures on which it rests, as a fundamental field which dominates the
picture of aphasia’ (p. 386).

195

THE BODY

function which shall be the same at all levels, which shall be equally
at work in the hidden preliminaries to speech and in articulatory
phenomena, which shall support the whole edifice of language, and
which nevertheless shall be stabilized in relatively autonomous pro¬
cesses. We shall have the opportunity of seeing this power, essential
to speech, in cases in which neither thought nor ‘motility’ is notice¬
ably affected, and yet in which the ‘life’ of language is impaired. It
does happen that vocabulary, syntax and the body of language ap¬
pear intact, the only peculiarity being that main clauses predominate.
But the patient does not make the same use as the normal subject of
these materials. He speaks practically only when he is questioned, or,
if he himself takes the initiative in asking a question, it is never other
than of a stereotyped kind, such as he asks daily of his children when
they come home from school. He never uses language to convey a
merely possible situation, and false statements (e.g. the sky is black)
are meaningless to him. He can speak only if he has prepared his
sentences.1 It cannot be held that language in his case has become
automatic; there is no sign of a decline of general intelligence, and it
is still the case that words are organized through their meaning. But
the meaning is, as it were, ossified. Schneider never feels the need to
speak; his experience never tends towards speech, it never suggests a
question to him, it never ceases to have that kind of self-evidence and
self-sufficiency of reality which stifles any interrogation, any reference
to the possible, any wonder, any improvisation. We can perceive, in
contrast with this, the essence of normal language : the intention to
speak can reside only in an open experience. It makes its appearance
like the boiling point of a liquid, when, in the density of being,
volumes of empty space arc built up and move outwards. ‘As soon
as man uses language to establish a living relation with himself or
with his fellows, language is no longer an instrument, no longer a
means; it is a manifestation, a revelation of intimate being and of the
psychic link which unites us to the world and our fellow men. The
patient’s language may display great knowledge, it may be capable of
being turned to account for specific activities, but it is totally lacking
in that productivity which is man’s deepest essence and which is
perhaps revealed nowhere so clearly, among civilisation's creations,
as in the creation of language itself.’* * * * * 8 It might be said, restating a
celebrated distinction, that languages or constituted systems of

vocabulary and syntax, empirically existing ‘means of expression’,

are both the repository and residue of acts of speech, in which un¬

formulated significance not only finds the means of being conveyed

1 Denary, Analyse eines Seelenbtldes von der Sprache aus. This is again Schneider’s

case, which we have analysed in connection with motility and sexuality.

8 Goldstein, L' Analyse de t'upbasie et {'essence iht /engage , p. 496. Our italics.

196

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

outwardly, but moreover acquires existence for itself, and is genuinely
created as significance. Or again one might draw a distinction between
the word in the speaking and the spoken word . The former is the one
in which the significant intention is at the stage of coming into being.
Here existence is polarized into a certain ‘significance’1 which cannot
be defined in terms of any natural object. It is somewhere at a point
beyond being that it aims to catch up with itself again, and that is
why it creates speech as an empirical support for its own not-being.
Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being. But the act
of expression constitutes a linguistic world and a cultural world, and
allows that to fall back into being which was striving to outstrip it.
Hence the spoken word, which enjoys available significances as one
might enjoy an acquired fortune. From these gains other acts of
authentic expression — the writer’s, artist’s or philosopher’s — are
made possible. This ever-recreated opening in the plenitude of being
is what conditions the child’s first use of speech and the language of
the writer, as it does the construction of the word and that of con¬
cepts. Such is the function which we intuit through language, which
reiterates itself, which is its own foundation, or which, like a wave,
gathers and poises itself to hurtle beyond its own limits.

The analysis of speech and expression brings home to us the enig¬
matic nature of our own body even more effectively than did our
remarks on bodily space and unity. It is not a collection of particles,
each one remaining in itself, nor yet a network of processes defined
once and for all — it is not where it is, nor what it is — since we see it
secreting in itself a ‘significance’ which comes to it from nowhere,
projecting that significance upon its material surrounding, and com¬
municating it to other embodied subjects. It has always been observed
that speech or gesture transfigure the body, but no more was said on
the subject than that they develop or disclose another power, that of
thought or soul. The fact was overlooked that, in order to express it,
the body must in the last analysis become the thought or intention
that it signifies for us. It is the body which points out, and which
speaks; so much we have learnt in this chapter. Cezanne used to say
of a portrait: ‘If I paint in all the little blue and brown touches, I
make him gaze as he does gaze. . . . Never mind if they suspect how,
by bringing together a green of various shades and a red, we sadden
a mouth or bring a smile to a cheek.’2 This disclosure of an immanent
or incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see,
to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the ex¬
perience of our own body, will discover in all other ‘objects’ the
miracle of expression. In his Peau de Chagrin Balzac describes a

1 ‘sens’ in French means ‘direction’ and ‘significance’ (Translator’s note).

2 J. Gasquet, Cezanne, p. 117.

197

THE BODY

‘white tablecloth, like a covering of snow newly fallen, from which
rose symmetrically the plates and napkins crowned with light-
coloured rolls’. ‘Throughout my youth,’ Cezanne said, ‘I wanted to
paint that table-cloth like freshly fallen snow. ... I know now that
one must try to paint only: “the plates and napkins rose sym¬
metrically”, and “the light-coloured rolls”. If I paint: “crowned”,
I’m finished, you see. And if I really balance and shade my napkins
and rolls as they really are, you may be sure that the crowning, the
snow and all the rest of it will be there.’* 1 The problem of the world,
and, to begin with, that of one’s own body, consists in the fact that
it is all there .

We have become accustomed, through the influence of the Carte¬
sian tradition, to jettison the subject: the reflective attitude simul¬
taneously purifies the common notions of body and soul by defining
the body as the sum of its parts with no interior, and the soul as a
being wholly present to itself without distance. These definitions
make matters perfectly clear both within and outside ourselves: we
have the transparency of an object with no secret recesses, the trans¬
parency of a subject which is nothing but what it thinks it is. The
object is an object through and through, and consciousness a con¬
sciousness through and through. There are two senses, and two only,
of the word ‘exist’: one exists as a thing or else one exists as a con¬
sciousness. The experience of our own body, on the other hand,
reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing. If I try to think of it as
a cluster of third person processes — ‘sight’, ‘motility’, ‘sexuality’ — I
observe that these ‘functions’ cannot be interrelated, and related to
the external world, by causal connections, they are all obscurely
drawn together and mutually implied in a unique drama. Therefore
the body is not an object. For the same reason, my awareness of it is
not a thought, that is to say, I cannot take it to pieces and reform it to
make a clear idea. Its unity is always implicit and vague. It is always
something other than what it is, always sexuality and at the same time
freedom, rooted in nature at the very moment when it is transformed
by cultural influences, never hermetically sealed and never left be¬
hind. Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have
no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it,
which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being
played out in it, and losing myself in it. I am my body, at least wholly

Uj iltw tfxlwil dm! I jKMiWMT -yet at ihc-^awe-Htne my

body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total
being. Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflec¬
tive procedure which detaches subject and object from each other,

1 J. Gasquet, Cezanne, pp. 123 and ff.

198

THE BODY AS EXPRESSION, AND SPEECH

and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as
an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality.
Descartes was well aware of this, since a famous letter of his to Eliza¬
beth draws the distinction between the body as it is conceived through
use in living and the body as it is conceived by the understanding.1
But in Descartes this peculiar knowledge of our body, which we enjoy
from the mere fact that we are a body, remains subordinated to our
knowledge of it through the medium of ideas, because, behind man
as he in fact is, stands God as the rational author of our de facto
situation. On the basis of this transcendent guarantee, Descartes can
blandly accept our irrational condition : it is not we who are required
to bear the responsibility for reason and, once we have recognized it
at the basis of things, it remains for us only to act and think in the
world.2 But if our union with the body is substantial, how is it pos¬
sible for us to experience in ourselves a pure soul from which to
accede to an absolute Spirit? Before asking this question, let us look
closely at what is implied in the rediscovery of our own body. It is
not merely one object among the rest which has the peculiarity of
resisting reflection and remaining, so to speak, stuck to the subject.
Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety.

1 To Elizabeth, 28th June 1643, AT, T. Ill, p. 690.

2 88 1 consider that it is very necessary to have understood, once in
one’s lifetime, the principles of metaphysics, since they are what provide us with
knowledge of God and our soul, I think too, however, that it would be extremely
harmful to occupy our mind often in meditating upon them, since it could not
then attend so effectively to the work of imagination and the senses; but that the
best course is merely to retain in memory and belief conclusions once arrived at,
and thenceforth to employ the rest of the time one can devote to study to thoughts
in which the understanding acts along with the imagination and the senses.’ Ibid.

199

PART TWO

The World as Perceived

The theory of the body is already a theory of
perception

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism : it keeps
the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sus¬
tains it inwardly, and with it forms a system. When I walk round my
flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me could not
possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know
that each of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another,
and if I were unaware of my own movements, and of my body as re¬
taining its identity through the stages of those movements. I can of
course take a mental bird’s eye view of the flat, visualize it or draw a
plan of it on paper, but in that case too I could not grasp the unity
of the object without the mediation of bodily experience, for what I
call a plan is only a more comprehensive perspective: it is the flat
‘seen from above’, and the fact that I am able to draw together in it
all habitual perspectives is dependent on my knowing that one and
the same embodied subject can view successively from various posi¬
tions. It will perhaps be objected that by restoring the object to bodily
experience as one of the poles of that experience, we deprive it of
precisely that which constitutes its objectivity. From the point of view
of my body I never see as equal the six sides of the cube, even if it is
made of glass, and yet the word ‘cube’ has a meaning; the cube itself,
the cube in reality, beyond its sensible appearances, has its six equal
sides. As I move round it, I see the front face, hitherto a square,
change its shape, then disappear, while the other sides come into
view and one by one become squares. But the successive stages of
this experience are for me merely the opportunity of conceiving the
whole cube with its six equal and simultaneous faces, the intelligible
structure which provides the explanation of it. And it is even neces¬
sary, for my tour of inspection of the cube to warrant the judgement :
‘here is a cube*, that my movements themselves be located in objec¬
tive space and, far from its being the case that the experience of my
own movement conditions the position of an object, it is, on the
contrary, by conceiving my body itself as a mobile object that I am
able to interpret perceptual appearance and construct the cube as it
truly is. The experience of my own movement would therefore appear
to be more than a psychological circumstance of perception and to
p 203

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

make no contribution to determining the significance of the object.
The object and my body, it will be alleged, certainly form a system,
but what we have then is a nexus of objective correlations and not,
as we have just said, a collection of lived-through correspondences.
The unity of the object is thus conceived, and not experienced, as the
correlative of our body’s unity.

But can the object be thus detached from the actual conditions
under which it is presented to us ? One can bring together discursively
the notion of the number six, the notion of ‘side’ and that of equality,
and link them together in a formula which is the definition of the
cube. But this definition rather puts a question to us than offers us
something to conceive. One emerges from blind, symbolic thought
only by perceiving the particular spatial entity which bears these pre¬
dicates all together. It is a question of visualizing that particular form
which encloses a fragment of space between six equal faces. Now, if
the words ‘enclose’ and ‘between’ have a meaning for us, it is because
they derive it from our experience as embodied subjects. In space
itself independently of the presence of a psycho-physical subject,
there is no direction, no inside and no outside. A space is ‘enclosed’
between the sides of a cube as we are enclosed between the walls of
our room. In order to be able to conceive the cube, we take up a
position in space, either on its surface, or in it. or outside it. and from
that moment we see it in perspective. The cube with six equal sides is
not only invisible, but inconceivable; it is the cube as it would be for
itself ; but the cube is not for itself, since it is an object. There is a first
order dogmatism, of which analytical reflection rids us, and which
consists in asserting that the object is in itself, or absolutely, without
wondering what it is. But there is another, which consists in affirming
the ostensible significance of the object, without wondering how it
enters into our experience. Analytical reflection puts forward, instead
of the absolute existence of the object, the thought of an absolute
object, and, through trying to dominate the object and think of it
from no point of view, it destroys the object’s internal structure. If
there is, for me, a cube with six equal sides, and if I can link up with
the object, this is not because I constitute it from the inside: it is
because I delve into the thickness of the world by perceptual ex¬
perience. The cube with six equal sides is the limiting idea whereby
I express the material presence of the cube which is there before my
eyes, under my hands, in its perceptual self-evidence. The sides of

the cube are not projections of it, but precisely sides. When I perceive

them successively, with the appearance they present in different per¬
spectives, I do not construct the idea of the flat projection which
accounts for these perspectives ; the cube is already there in front of
me and reveals itself through them. I do not need to take an objective

204

THEORY OF THE BODY IS ALREADY A THEORY OF PERCEPTION

view of my own movement, or take it into account, in order to recon¬
stitute the true form of the object behind its appearance; the account
is already taken, and already the new appearance has compounded
itself with the lived-through movement and presented itself as an
appearance of a cube. The thing, and the world, are given to me
along with the parts of my body, not by any ‘natural geometry’, but
in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with that
existing between the parts of my body itself.

External perception and the perception of one’s own body vary
in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same
act. The attempt has long been made to explain Aristotle’s celebrated
illusion by allowing that the unaccustomed position of the fingers
makes the synthesis of their perceptions impossible: the right side of
the middle finger and the left side of the index do not ordinarily
‘work’ together, and if both are touched at once, then there must be
two marbles. In reality, the perceptions of the two fingers are not
only disjoined, they are inverted: the subject attributes to the index
what is touched by the middle finger and vice versa , as can be shown
by applying two distinct stimuli to the fingers, a point and a ball, for
example.1 Aristotle’s illusion is primarily a disturbance of the body
image. What makes the synthesis of the two tactile perceptions in one
single object impossible, is not so much that the position of the
fingers is unaccustomed or statistically rare, it is that the right face
of the middle finger and the left face of the index cannot combine in
a joint exploration of the object, that the crossing of the fingers, being
a movement which has to be imposed on them, lies outside the motor
possibilities of the fingers themselves and cannot be aimed at in a
project towards movement. The synthesis of the object is here
effected, then, through the synthesis of one’s own body, it is the reply
or correlative to it, and it is literally the same thing to perceive one
single marble, and to use two fingers as one single organ. The dis¬
turbance of the body image may even be directly translated into the
external world without the intervention of any stimulus. In heauto-
scopy, before seeing himself, the subject always passes through a state
akin to dreaming, musing or disquiet, and the image of himself which
appears outside him is merely the counterpart of this depersonaliza¬
tion.2 The patient has the feeling of being in the double outside

1 Tastevin, Czermak, Schilder, quoted by Lhermitte, VImage de noire Corps ,
pp. 36 and ff.

* Lhermitte, V Image de noire Corps , pp. 136-88, cf. p. 191 : ‘During the period
of autoscopy the subject is overcome by a feeling of profound sadness which
spreads outwards and into the very image of the double, which seems to be filled
with effective vibrations identical with those experienced by the original person’;
‘his consciousness seems to have moved wholly outside himself’. And Menninger-
Lerchenthal, Das Truggebilde der eigenen Gestalt , p. 180: ‘I suddenly had the
impression of being outside my body.’

205

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

himself, just as, in a lift which goes upwards and suddenly stops, I feel
the substance of my body escaping from me through my head and
overrunning the boundaries of my objective body. It is in his own
body that the patient feels the approach of this Other whom he has
never seen with his eyes, as the normal person is aware, through a
certain burning feeling in the nape of the neck, that someone is
watching him from behind.* 1 Conversely, a certain form of external
experience implies and produces a certain consciousness of one’s own
body. Many patients speak of a ‘sixth sense’ which seems to produce
their hallucinations. Stratton’s subject, whose visual field has been
objectively inverted, at first sees everything upside down; on the
third day of the experiment, when things are beginning to regain
their upright position, he is filled with ‘the strange impression of
looking at the fire out of the back of his head’.2 This is because there
is an immediate equivalence between the orientation of the visual
field and the awareness of one’s own body as the potentiality of that
field, so that any upheaval experimentally brought about can appear
indifferently either as the inversion of phenomenal objects or as a
redistribution of sensory functions in the body. If one subject focuses
for long-distance vision, he has a double image of his own finger as
indeed of all objects near to him. If he is touched or pricked, he is
aware of being touched or pricked in two places.3 Diplopia is thus
extended into a bodily duplication. Every external perception is
immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body,
just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language
of external perception. If, then, as we have seen to be the case,
the body is not a transparent object, and is not presented to us in
virtue of the law of its constitution, as the circle is to the geometer,
if it is an expressive unity which we can learn to know only by
actively taking it up, this structure will be passed on to the
sensible world. The theory of the body image is, implicitly, a theory
of perception. We have relearned to feel our body ; we have found
underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body
that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always being
with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall
need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so
far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we per¬
ceive the world with our body. But by thus remaking contact with
the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover ourself, since.

perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as
it were, the subject of perception.

1 Jaspers, quoted by Menninger-Lerchenthal, op. cit., p. 76.

2 Stratton, Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image , p. 350.

3 Lhermitte, V Image cie notre Corps , p. 39.

206

SENSE EXPERIENCE

OBJECTIVE thought is unaware of the subject of perception. This
is because it presents itself with the world ready made, as the setting of
every possible event, and treats perception as one of these events. For
example, the empiricist philosopher considers a subject a- in the act of
perceiving and tries to describe what happens: there are sensations
which are the subject's states or manners of being and, in virtue of
this, genuine mental things. The perceiving subject is the place where
these things occur, and the philosopher describes sensations and their
substratum as one might describe the fauna of a distant land — with¬
out being aware that he himself perceives, that he is the perceiving
subject and that perception as he lives it belies everything that he
says of perception in general. For, seen from the inside, perception
owes nothing to what we know in other ways about the world, about
stimuli as physics describes them and about the sense organs as de¬
scribed by biology. It does not present itself in the first place as an
event in the world to which the category of causality, for example,
can be applied, but as a re-creation or re-constitution of the world at
every moment. In so far as we believe in the world’s past, in the
physical world, in ‘stimuli’, in the organism as our books depict it,
it is first of all because we have present at this moment to us a per¬
ceptual field, a surface in contact with the world, a permanent
rootedness in it, and because the world ceaselessly assails and be¬
leaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore. All
knowledge takes its place within the horizons opened up by percep¬
tion. There can be no question of describing perception itself as one
of the facts thrown up in the world, since we can never fill up, in the
picture of the world, that gap which we ourselves are, and by which
it comes into existence for someone, since perception is the ‘flaw*
in this ‘great diamond’.* Intellectualism certainly represents a step

* Cf. Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes

Sont Ie defaut de ton grand diamant.

Translator’s note.) Paul VaI6ry> Le ClmetBn imrin.

207

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

forward in coming to self-consciousness : that place outside the world
at which the empiricist philosopher hints, and in which he tacitly takes
up his position in order to describe the event of perception, now re¬
ceives a name, and appears in the description. It is the transcendental
Ego. Through it every empiricist thesis is reversed: the state of con¬
sciousness becomes the consciousness of a state, passivity the positing
of passivity, the world becomes the correlative of thought about the
world and henceforth exists only for a constituting agent. And yet it
remains true to say that intellectualism too provides itself with a
ready-made world. For the constitution of the world, as conceived
by it, is a mere requirement that to each term of the empiricist de¬
scription be added the indication ‘consciousness of . . .’ The whole
system of experience — world, own body and empirical self— are
subordinated to a universal thinker charged with sustaining the re¬
lationships between the three terms. But, since he is not actually in¬
volved, these relationships remain what they were in empiricism:
causal relations spread out in the context of cosmic events. Now, if
one’s own body and the empirical self are no more than elements of
the system of experience, objects among other objects in the eyes of
the true 7, how can we ever be confused with our body? How can we
ever have believed that we saw with our eyes what we in fact grasp
through an inspection of the mind; how is it that the world does not
present itself to us as perfectly explicit; why is it displayed only
gradually and never ‘in its entirety’? In short, how does it come
about that we perceive ? We shall understand this only if the empirical
self and the body are not immediately objects, in fact only if they
never quite become objects, if there is a certain significance in saying
that I can see the piece of wax with my eyes, and if correlatively the
possibility of absence, the dimension of escape and freedom which
reflection opens in the depths of our being, and which is called the
transcendental Ego, are not initially given and are never absolutely
acquired; if I can never say T absolutely, and if every act of reflec¬
tion, every voluntary taking up of a position is based on the ground
and the proposition of a life of pre-personal consciousness. The sub¬
ject of perception will remain overlooked as long as we cannot avoid
the dilemma of natura naturqta and natura naturans , of sensation as
a state of consciousness and as the consciousness of a state, of exist¬
ence in itself and existence for itself. Let us then return to sensation
and scrutinize it closely enough to learn from it the living relation of
rh£ pmtmv 16 his body and to Jus world. -

Inductive psychology will help us in our search for a new status
for sensation, by showing that it is neither a state or a quality, nor
the consciousness of a state or of a quality. In fact, each of the alleged
qualities — red, blue, colour, sound — is inserted into a certain form of

208

SENSE EXPERIENCE

behaviour. In the normal subject a sensory excitation, particularly
of the experimental kind which has practically no living significance
for him, scarcely has any effect on general motility. But diseases of
the cerebellum or the frontal cortex clearly show what effect sensory
excitations would have on muscular tonicity, if they were not in¬
tegrated into a comprehensive situation, and if tonicity were not, in
the normal person, adjusted to certain special tasks. The gesture of
raising the arm, which can be taken as an indicator of motor dis¬
turbance, is differently modified in its sweep and its direction accord¬
ing as the visual field is red, yellow, blue or green. Red and yellow
are particularly productive of smooth movements, blue and green of
jerky ones; red applied to the right eye, for example, favours a corre¬
sponding stretching of the arm outwards, green the bending of the
arm back towards the body.1 The privileged position of the arm—
the one in which the arm is felt to be balanced and at rest— which is
farther away from the body in the patient than in the normal sub¬
ject, is modified by the presentation of colours: green brings it back
nearer to the body.2 The colour of the visual field affects the accuracy
of the subject’s reactions, whether it is a question of performing a
movement of a given extent or measuring with the finger a definite
length. With a green visual field the assessment is accurate, with a
red one the subject errs on the side of excess. Movements outwards
are accelerated by green and slowed down by red. Localization of
stimuli on the skin is modified by red in the direction of abduction.
Yellow and red emphasize errors in judging weight and time, though
in the case of cerebellar patients blue and particularly green have a
compensating effect. In these various experiments each colour always
acts with the same tendency, with the result that a definite motor
value can be assigned to it. Generally speaking, red and yellow favour
abduction, blue and green adduction. Now, on the whole, the signi¬
ficance of adduction is that the organism turns towards the stimulus
and is attracted by the world — of abduction that it turns away from
the stimulus and withdraws towards its centre.3 Sensations, ‘sensible
qualities’ are then far from being reducible to a certain indescribable
state or quale; they present themselves with a motor physiognomy,
and are enveloped in a living significance. It has long been known
that sensations have a ‘motor accompaniment’, that stimuli set in
motion ‘incipient movements’ which are associated with the sensation
of the quality and create a halo round it, and that the ‘perceptual
side’ and the ‘motor side’ of behaviour are in communication with

1 Goldstein and Rosenthal, Zum Problem der Wirkung der Farben auf den
Organismus , pp. 3-9.

2 Ibid.

3 La Structure du Comportement, p. 201 .

209

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

each other. But it is usual to proceed as if this relation left unaffected
the terms between winch it stands* For there is no question, in the
examples given above, of an external, causal relationship leaving the
sensation itself unchanged. Motor reactions produced by blue, ‘blue-
occasioned conduct’, are not the effects of colour on the objective
body, defined in terms of specific wavelength and intensity : for a blue
produced by contrast, and therefore having no physical phenomenon
corresponding to it, lias around it the same motor halo*1 2 Where the
motor physiognomy of colour is constituted is not in the physicist’s
world, as a result of some occult process* Is it then ‘in consciousness’,
and must we say that the experience of blue as a sensible quality
produces a certain change in the phenomenal body? But it is not
obvious why the clear awareness of a certain quale should affect my
judgement of sizes, and moreover the felt effect of colour does not
always exactly correspond to the influence exerted by it on behaviour;
red may accentuate my reactions without my being aware of it.a The
motor significance of colours is comprehensible only if they cease to
be closed states or indescribable qualities presented to an observing
and thinking subject, and if they impinge within me upon a certain
general setting through which I come to terms with the world; if,
moreover, they suggest to me a new manner of evaluating, and yet if
motility ceases to be the mere consciousness of my movements from
place to place in the present or immediate future, and becomes the
function which constantly lays down my standards of size and the
varying scope of my being in the world* Blue is that which prompts
me to look in a certain way, that which allows my gaze to run over
it in a specific manner. It is a certain field or atmosphere presented
to the power of my eyes and of my whole body* Here the experience
of colours confirms and elucidates the correlations established by
inductive psychology* Green is commonly regarded as a ‘restful’
colour. ‘It encloses me within myself and brings a peaceful state,*
says one patient.3 4 * 6 * It ‘makes no demands on us and does not enjoin us
to do anything,’ says Kandinsky. Blue seems to ‘yield to our gaze/
says Goethe, On the other hand, he adds, red Invades the eye/11 Red
has a ‘rending’, and yellow a ‘stinging’ effect, says one of Goldstein’s
patients. Generally speaking we have on the one hand, with red and
yellow, ‘an experience of being tom away, of a movement away from
the centre1; on the other hand, with blue and green, that of ‘repose
and concentration’.* We can reveal the soporific and motor basis of

■'•■ooMsiem and Kosehtmi, art. m., p :tt. -

2 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

4 Kandinsky, Form undFarbe in der Metier ei ; Goethe, Farbenlehre, in particular

Abs, 293; quoted by Goldstein and Rosenthal. Ibid.

6 Goldstein and Rosenthal, pp. 23-5.

210

SENSE EXPERIENCE

qualities, or their vital significance, by employing stimuli which are
either weak or of short duration. In this case the colour, before being
seen, gives itself away through the experience of a certain bodily
attitude appropriate only to that colour and precisely indicative of
it: ‘there is in my body a sensation of slipping downwards, so that it
cannot be green, and can be only blue but in fact I see no blue’,1 says
one subject. Another says : ‘I clenched my teeth, and so I know that it
is yellow.’2 If a light stimulus is gradually increased from a sub¬
liminal intensity, there is first of all the experience of a certain bodily
disposition and suddenly the sensation runs into and ‘spreads through
the visual domain’.3 Just as, when I look closely at snow, I break its
apparent ‘whiteness’ up into a world of reflections and transpar¬
encies, so within a musical note a ‘micromelody’ can be picked out
and the interval heard is merely the final patterning of a certain
tension felt throughout the body.4

The representation of a colour in subjects who have lost it is made
possible by displaying before them simply any real colours. The real
colour produces in the subject a ‘concentration of colour experience’
which enables him to ‘draw together the colours in his eye’.5 Thus,
before becoming an objective spectacle, quality is revealed by a type
of behaviour which is directed towards it in its essence, and this is
why my body has no sooner adopted the attitude of blue than I am
vouchsafed a quasi-presence of blue. We must therefore stop wonder¬
ing how and why red signifies effort or violence, green restfulness and
peace; we must rediscover how to live these colours as our body does,
that is, as peace or violence in concrete form. When we say that red
increases the compass of our reactions, we are not to be understood
as having in mind two distinct facts, a sensation of redness and motor
reactions — we must be understood as meaning that red, by its texture
as followed and adhered to by our gaze, is already the amplification
of our motor being. The subject of sensation is neither a thinker who
takes note of a quality, nor an inert setting which is affected or
changed by it, it is a power which is born into, and simultaneously
with, a certain existential environment, or is synchronized with it.
The relations of sentient to sensible are comparable with those of the
sleeper to his slumber: sleep comes when a certain voluntary attitude
suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was
waiting. I am breathing deeply and slowly in order to summon sleep,
and suddenly it is as if my mouth were connected to some great lung
outside myself which alternately calls forth and forces back my

1 Werner, Untersuchungen uber Empfindung und Empfinden , I, p. 158.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. (59.

4 Werner, Vber die Aitsptdgung von Tongestalten.

6 Werner, Untersuchungen uber Empfindung und Empfinden , I, p. 160.

211

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

breath. A certain rhythm of respiration, which a moment ago I
voluntarily maintained, now becomes my very being, and sleep, until
now aimed at as a significance, suddenly becomes a situation. In the
same way I give ear, or look, in the expectation of a sensation, and
suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I
surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular
manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red. Just as
the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation
of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to
occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of
the consecrated bread, provided that they are inwardly prepared, in
the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance,
but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world sug¬
gested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by
our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is
literally a form of communion.

Taking this view, it becomes possible to attach to the notion of
‘significance’ a value which intellectualism withholds from it. My
sensation and my perception, according to this theory, are capable of
being specified and hence of existing for me only by being the sensa¬
tion or perception of something — for instance, the sensation of blue
or red, or the perception of the table or the chair. Now blue and red
are not those incommunicable experiences which are mine when I
coincide with them, nor are the table and the chair those short-lived
appearances which are dependent on my gaze. The object is made
determinate as an identifiable being only through a whole open series
of possible experiences, and exists only for a subject who carries out
this identification. Being is exclusively for someone who is able to
step back from it and thus stand wholly outside being. In this way
the mind becomes the subject of perception and the notion of ‘signi¬
ficance’ becomes inconceivable. If seeing or hearing involved ex¬
tricating oneself from the impression in order to lay siege to it in
thought, ceasing, that is, to be in order to know, then it would be
ridiculous to say that 1 see with my eyes or hear with my ears, for my
eyes and ears are themselves entities in the world and as such are
quite incapable of maintaining on the hither side of it that area of
subjectivity from which it is seen or heard. Even by making them
instruments of my perception I cannot ensure that my eyes and ears
retain any cognitive power, for the notion of perception is ambigu¬

ous: they are instruments of bodily excitation only, and not of per-
ception itself. There is no middle term between in itself and for itself
and since my senses, being several, are not myself, they can be only
objects. I say that my eyes see, that my hand touches, that my foot
is aching, but these naive expressions do not put into words my true

212

SENSE EXPERIENCE

experience. Already they provide me with an interpretation of that
experience which detaches it from its original subject* Because I
know that the light strikes my eyes, that contact is made by the skin,
that my shoe hurts my foot, I distribute through my body percep¬
tions which really belong to my soul, and put perception into the
thing perceived* But that is merely the spatial and temporal furrow
left by the acts of consciousness. If I consider them from the inside,
I find one single, unlocalized knowledge, one single indivisible soul,
and there is no such difference between thinking and perceiving as
there is between seeing and hearing* Can we remain within this per¬
spective? If it is true that I do not see with my eyes, how can I ever
have been ignorant of this truth? Perhaps I did not know what I was
saying, or perhaps I had not thought about it. But how could I not
have thought about it? How could the scrutiny of my mind, how
could the working of my own thought be concealed from me, since
by definition my thought is for itself? If reflection is to justify itself
as reflection, that is to say, as progress towards the truth, it must not
merely put one view of the world in place of another, it must show us
how the naive view of the world is included in and transcended by
the sophisticated one. Reflection must elucidate the unreflective view
which it supersedes, and show the possibility of this latter, in order
to comprehend itself as a beginning. To say that it is still myself who
conceive myself as situated in a body and furnished with five senses
is clearly a purely verbal solution, since I who reflect cannot recognize
myself in this embodied /, since therefore embodiment remains in the
nature of the case an illusion, and since the possibility of this illusion
remains incomprehensible. We must re-examine the dilemma of for
itself and in itself, which involved putting ‘significances’ back into
the world of objects and freeing subjectivity, as absolute non-being,
of any kind of inherence in the body. This is what we are doing when
we define sensation as co-existence or communion. The sensation of
blue is not the knowledge or positing of a certain identifiable quale
throughout all the experiences of it which I have, as the geometer’s
circle is the same in Paris and Tokyo. It is in all probability intentional,
which means that it does not rest in itself as does a thing, but that it
is directed and has significance beyond itself. But what it aims at is
recognized only blindly, through my body’s familiarity with it. It is
not constituted in the full light of day, it is reconstituted or taken up
once more by a knowledge which remains latent,. leaving it with its
opacity and its thisness* Sensation is intentional because I find that
in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward — abduc¬
tion or adduction — and that, following up this hint, and stealing into
the form of existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought
into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open

213

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate
around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to
cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is
because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters
into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds
in them his momentary law.

Let us be more explicit. The sentiment and the sensible do not
stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and
sensation is not an invasion of the sentient by the sensible. It is my
gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which
subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour,
and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction
between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held
that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers
significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my
hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is
nothing but a vague beckoning. ‘If a subject tries to experience a
specific colour, blue for example, while trying to take up the bodily
attitude appropriate to red, an inner conflict results, a sort of spasm
which stops as soon as he adopts the bodily attitude corresponding
to blue.’1 Thus a sensible datum which is on the point of being felt
sets a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve. I must find the
attitude which will provide it with the means of becoming deter¬
minate, of showing up as blue; I must find the reply to a question
which is obscurely expressed. And yet I do so only when I am invited
by it, my attitude is never sufficient to make me really see blue or
really touch a hard surface. The sensible gives back to me what I lent
to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place. As I con¬
template the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as an acosmic
subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some
idea of blue such as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to
it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’,* * I am the
sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist
for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue. But,
it may be retorted, the sky is not mind and there is surely no sense in
saying that it exists for itself. It is indeed true that the geographer’s
or the astronomer’s sky does not exist for itself. But of the sky, as it is
perceived or sensed, subtended by my gaze which ranges over and
resides in it, and providing as it does the theatre of a certain living

1 Werner, Untersuchungen iiber Empfindung und Empfinden , I, p. 158.

* Cf. ‘Midi la-haut, Midi sans mouvement

En soi se pense et convient k soi-meme.’

Valery, Le Cimetiere mar in

(Translator’s note.)

214

SENSE EXPERIENCE

pulsation adopted by my body, it can be said that it exists for itself,
in the sense that it is not made up of mutually exclusive parts, that
each part of the whole is ‘sensitive* to what happens in all the others,
and ‘knows them dynamically*,1 As for the subject of sensation, he
need not be a pure nothingness with no terrestrial weight. That
would be necessary only if, like constituting consciousness, he had
to be simultaneously omnipresent, coextensive with being, and in
process of thinking universal truth. But the spectacle perceived does
not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of
my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre¬
supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution,
so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural
powers at which 1 am the first to be filled with wonder, I am not,
therefore, in Hegel's phrase, ‘a hole in being*, but a hollow, a fo!d[
which has been made and which can be unmade,2
Wc must stress this point. How have we managed to escape from
the dilemma of theybr itself and the in itself how can perceptual con¬
sciousness be saturated with its object, how can we distinguish
sensible consciousness from intellectual consciousness? Because: (1)
Every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is
presented to us anonymously. I cannot say that / see the blue of the
sky in the sense in which I say that 1 understand a book or again in
which I decide to devote my life to mathematics. My perception,
even when seen from the inside, expresses a given situation: I can see
blue because I am sensitive to colours, whereas personal acts create
a situation: I am a mathematician because I have decided to be one.
So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought
to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensa¬
tion carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such
as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when
we really try to live at the level of sensation. It is true that knowledge
teaches me that sensation would not occur unless my body were in
some way adapted to it, for example, that there would be no specific
contact unless I moved my hand. But this activity takes place on the
periphery of my being, I am no more aware of being the true subject
of my sensation than of my birth or my death. Neither my birth nor
my death can appear to me as experiences of my own, since, if I
thought of them thus, I should be assuming myself to be pre-existent
to, or outliving, myself, in order to be able to experience them, and I
should therefore not be genuinely thinking of my birth or my death.

1 Koehler, Die physischen Gestalten , p. 180.

2 We have pointed out elsewhere that consciousness seen from outside cannot
be a pure/<?r itself {La Structure du Comporiement, pp. 168 and ff.). We are be¬
ginning to see that the same applies to consciousness seen from the inside.

215

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

I can, then, apprehend myself only as ‘already born’ and ‘still alive’ —
I can apprehend my birth and my death only as prepersonal horizons :
I know that people are born and die, but I cannot know my own birth
and death. Each sensation, being strictly speaking, the first, last and
only one of its kind, is a birth and a death. The subject who experi¬
ences it begins and ends with it, and as he can neither precede nor
survive himself, sensation necessarily appears to itself in a setting of
generality, its origin is anterior to myself, it arises from sensibility
which has preceded it and which will outlive it, just as my birth and
death belong to a natality and a mortality which are anonymous. By
means of sensation I am able to grasp, on the fringe of my own
personal life and acts, a life of given consciousness from which these
latte!* emerge, the life of my eyes, hands and ears, which are so many
natural selves. Each time I experience a sensation, I feel that it con¬
cerns not my own being, the one for which I am responsible and for
which I make decisions, but another self which has already sided
with the world, which is already open to certain of its aspects and
synchronized with them. Between my sensation and myself there
stands always the thickness of some primal acquisition which pre¬
vents my experience from being clear of itself. I experience the sensa¬
tion as a modality of a general existence, one already destined for a
physical world and which runs through me without my being the
cause of it.

(2) Sensation can be anonymous only because it is incomplete.
The person who sees and the one who touches is not exactly myself,
because the visible and the tangible worlds are not the world in its
entirety. When I see an object, I always feel that there is a portion of
being beyond what I see at this moment, not only as regards visible
being, but also as regards what is tangible or audible. And not only
sensible being, but a depth of the object that no progressive sensory
deduction will ever exhaust. In a corresponding way, I am not myself
wholly in these operations, they remain marginal. They occur out in
front of me, for the self which sees or the self which hears is in some
way a specialized self, familiar with only one sector of being, and it is
precisely for this reason that eye and hand are able to guess the
movement which will fix the perception, thus displaying that fore¬
knowledge which gives them an involuntary appearance.

We may summarize these two ideas by saying that any sensation
belongs rn a rerrain field Tn say, that T have a visual firfd ia in say

that by reason of my position I have access to and an opening upon
a system of beings, visible beings, that these are at the disposal of my
gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contract and through a gift of
nature, with no effort made on my part; from which it follows that
vision is prepersonal. And it follows at the same time that it is always

216

SENSE EXPERIENCE

limited, that around what I am looking at at a given moment is spread
a horizon of things which are not seen, or which are even invisible.
Vision is a thought subordinated to a certain field, and this is what is
called a sense. When I say that I have senses and that they give me
access to the world, I am not the victim of some muddle, I do not
confuse causal thinking and reflection, I merely express this truth
which forces itself upon reflection taken as a whole: that I am able,
being connatural with the world, to discover a sense in certain
aspects of being without having myself endowed them with it through
any constituting operation.

The distinction between the different senses finds its justification
along with that between the senses and intellection. Intellectual ism
does not talk about the senses because for it sensations and senses
appear only when I turn back to the concrete act of knowledge in
order to analyse it. I then distinguish in it a contingent matter and a
necessary form, but matter is an unreal phase and not a separable
element of the total act. Therefore there are not the senses, but only
consciousness. For example, intellectual ism declines to state the
notorious problem of the contribution of the senses to the experience
of space, because sensible qualities and the senses, as materials of
knowledge, cannot possess space in their own right, for it is the form
of objectivity in general, and in particular the means whereby any
consciousness of quality becomes possible. A sensation would be no
sensation at all if it were not the sensation of something, and ‘things’
in the most general sense of the word, for example specific qualities,
stand out from the amorphous mass of impressions only if the latter
is put into perspective and co-ordinated by space. Tlius all senses are
spatial if they are to give us access to some form or other of being, if,
that is, they are senses at all. And, by the same necessity, they must
all open on the same space, otherwise the sensory beings with which
they bring us into communication would exist only for the relevant
sense— like ghosts which appear only by night— they would lack full¬
ness of being and we could not be truly conscious of them, that is to
say, posit them as true beings. Empiricism could not find facts to refute
this deduction. If for example we desire to show that the sense of
touch is not spatial by itself, if we try, in cases of real or psychic
blindness, to discover a pure tactile experience, and to prove that its
articulation owes nothing to space, these experimental proofs pre¬
suppose what they are meant to establish. How are we to know in
fact whether blindness and psychic blindness have abstracted from
the patient’s experience the merely ‘visual data’, and whether they
have not also affected the structure of his tactile experience? Em¬
piricism takes the former hypothesis for granted, which fact alone
makes it possible for its assumption to be regarded as crucial, but

217

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

which equally involves postulating the separation of the senses,
which is precisely what has to be proved. To be more precise: if I
admit that space belongs primarily to sight and that from sight it is
transmitted to touch and the other senses, then since there is in the
adult, to all appearances, a tactile perception of space, I must at least
concede that the ‘pure tactile data’ are displaced and overlaid by an
experience having its source in sight, and that they become integrated
into a total experience in which they are ultimately indiscernible. But
then what justification is there for distinguishing, within this adult
experience, a ‘tactile’ contribution? Is not the alleged ‘purely tactile’,
which I try to extract by investigating blindness, a highly particu¬
larized kind of experience, which has nothing in common with the
functioning of touch in its wholeness, and which cannot give any
help in the analysis of integrated experience? No conclusions about
the spatiality of the senses by the inductive method and by adducing
‘facts’ (for example, a sense of touch without space in the case of the
blind man) can be drawn, for this fact needs to be interpreted, and it
will indeed be interpreted as a significant fact which brings to light
the distinctive nature of touch, or us an accidental fact showing the
peculiar properties of touch when modified by some disorder,
according to the notion entertained of the senses in general and of
their relations to each other within total consciousness. The pro¬
blem belongs to the domain of reflection and not to that of experi¬
ment -as the empiricist understands it, which is also as scientists
understand it when they dream of an absolute objectivity. There
is therefore reason for holding a priori that all the senses are spatial,
and the question which is the one which presents us with space must
be considered unintelligible if we reflect on just what a sense is. Two
sorts of reflection, however, are possible here. One — intellectualist
reflection — thematizes the object and consciousness, and, to use a
Kantian expression, it ‘leads them to the concept’. The object then
becomes what is, and consequently what is for everybody and for
ever (even if only as a fleeting episode, yet of which it will for ever
be true to say that it existed at an objective moment of time). Con¬
sciousness, thematized by reflection, is existence for itself. And, with
the help of this idea of consciousness and this other idea of object,
it is easily shown that every sensible quality is fully an object only in
the context of universal relations, and that there can be sensation
only uii wmiilkm-iEmi ft-uxiutu fur a cimtml ■uitiqttu- ■/.

wished to call a halt in the reflective process, and talk, for example,
about a partial consciousness or an isolated object, we should then
have a consciousness which in some respect did not know itself and
which would therefore not be consciousness at all, and an object
which would not be accessible from everywhere, and which to this

218

SENSE EXPERIENCE

extent would not be an object. But we may always inquire of in-
tellectualism whence it derives this idea or this essence of conscious¬
ness and of the object. If the subject is pure for itself, ‘the I think
must be able to accompany all our representations’. ‘If a world must
be capable of being thought’, quality must contain it in embryo. But
in the first place by what means do we know that there is any pure
for itself and where do we learn that the world must be capable of
being thought? The reply will perhaps be that that is the definition
of subject and world and that, short of understanding them in this
way, we no longer know what we are talking about when we speak
of them. And indeed, at the level of constituted speech, such is in fact
the significance of world and subject. But from where do the words
themselves derive their sense? Radical reflection is what takes hold
of me as I am in the act of forming and formulating the ideas of sub¬
ject and object, and brings to light the source of these two ideas; it is
reflection, not only in operation, but conscious of itself in operation.
It will perhaps be replied that analytical reflection does not merely
grasp subject and object ‘as an idea’, but that it is an experience, that
by reflecting I put myself back inside that subject without finite limits,
that I was before, and put back the object among the relations which
previously subtended it. Finally that there is no reason to ask whence
I derive these ideas of subject and object, since they are simply the
formulation of those conditions without which nothing would exist
for anybody. But the reflective I differs from the unreflective at least
in having been thematized, and what is given is not consciousness or
pure being; it is, as Kant himself profoundly put it, experience, in
other words the communication of a finite subject with an opaque
being from which it emerges but to which it remains committed. It
is ‘pure and, in a way, still mute experience which it is a question of
bringing to the pure expression of its own significance’.1 We have the
experience of a world, not understood as a system of relations which
wholly determine each event, but as an open totality the synthesis of
which is inexhaustible. We have the experience of an I not in the
sense of an absolute subjectivity, but indivisibly demolished and re¬
made by the course of time. The unity of either the subject or the
object is not a real unity, but a presumptive unity on the horizon of
experience. We must rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject
and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent object, that
primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being.
As far as consciousness is concerned, I can arrive at a notion of it
only by taking myself back in the first place to that consciousness
which I am. I must be particularly careful not to begin by defining
the senses; I must instead resume contact with the sensory life which
1 Husserl, Meditations cartesiennes, p. 33.

219

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

I live from within. We are not obliged to endow the world a priori
with those conditions in the absence of which it is unthinkable, for,
in order to be thought of, it must in the first place not be outside
knowledge, it must exist for me, that is, be given, and the transcen¬
dental aesthetic would be confused with the transcendental analytic
only if I were a God who posits the world and not a man who finds
himself thrown into it, and who, in every sense of the word, ‘is
wrapped up in it’. We do not therefore need to follow Kant in his
deduction of one single space. The single space is the indispensable
condition for being able to conceive the plenitude of objectivity, and
it is quite true that if I try to thematize several spaces, they merge
into a unity, each one standing in a certain positional relationship
to the others, and therefore amalgamating with them. But do we
know whether plenary objectivity can be conceived? Whether all
perspectives are compossible? Whether they can all be thematized
together somewhere? Do we know whether tactile and visual ex¬
periences can, strictly speaking, be joined without an intersensory
experience? Whether my experience and that of another person can
be linked in a single system of intersubjective experience? There may
well be, either in each sensory experience or in each consciousness,
‘phantoms’ which no rational approach can account for. The whole
Transcendental Deduction hangs on the affirmation of a complete
system of truth. It is precisely to the sources of this affirmation that
we mugt revert if we wish to adopt a reflective method. In this con¬
nection we may hold with Husserl* 1 that Hume went, in intention,
further than anyone in radical reflection, since he genuinely tried
to take us back to those phenomena of which we have experience, on
the hither side of any formation of ideas, — even though he went on
to dissect and emasculate this experience. The idea of a single space
and a single time, being grounded upon that of a summation of
being, which is precisely what Kant subjected to criticism in the
Transcendental Dialectic, needs in particular to be bracketed and to
produce its genealogy from the starting point of our affective ex¬
perience. This' new conception of reflection which is the phenomeno¬
logical conception of it, amounts in other words to giving a new
definition of the a priori . Kant has already shown that the a priori is
not knowable in advance of experience, that is, outside our horizon
of facticity, and that there can be no question of distinguishing two

dements of knowledge ; sue a p+iwi and the ether a pwh ni&ti, In m

far as the a priori in his philosophy retains the character of what
must necessarily be, as opposed to what in fact exists and is deter¬
minate in human terms, this is only to the extent that he has not
followed out his programme, which was to define our cognitive

1 Formale und Transzendentale Logik, e.g. p. 226.

220

SENSE EXPERIENCE

powers in terms of our factual condition, and which necessarily com¬
pelled him to set every conceivable being against the background of
this world. From the moment that experience— that is, the opening
on to our de facto world— is recognized as the beginning of know¬
ledge, there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of a priori
truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be
and what it actually is. The unity of the senses, which was regarded
as an a priori truth, is no longer anything but the formal expression
of a fundamental contingency: the fact that we are in the world— the
diversity of the senses, which was regarded as given a posteriori ,
including the concrete form that it assumes in a human subject,
appears as necessary to this world, to the only world which we can
think of consequentially; it therefore becomes an a priori truth.
Every sensation is spatial; we have adopted this thesis, not because
the quality as an object cannot be thought otherwise than in space,
but because, as the primordial contact with being, as the assumption
by the sentient subject of a form of existence to which the sensible
points, and as the co-existence of sentient and sensible, it is itself
constitutive of a setting for co-existence, in other words, of a space.
We say a priori that no sensation is atomic, that all sensory experi¬
ence presupposes a certain field, hence co-existences, from which we
conclude, against Lachelier, that the blind man has the experience
of a space. But these a priori truths amount to nothing other than
the making explicit of a fact : the fact of the sensory experience as the
assumption of a form of existence. Moreover, this assumption im¬
plies also that I can at each moment absorb myself almost wholly
into the sense of touch or sight, and even that I can never see or
touch without my consciousness becoming thereby in some measure
saturated, and losing something of its availability. Thus the unity
and the diversity of the senses are truths of the same order. The a
priori is the fact understood, made explicit, and followed through
into all the consequences of its latent logic; the a posteriori is the
isolated and implicit fact. It would be contradictory to assert that
the sense of touch is devoid of spatiality, and it is a priori impossible
to touch without touching in space, since our experience is the ex¬
perience of a world. But this insertion of the tactile perspective into
a universal being does not represent any necessity external to touch,
it comes about spontaneously in the experience of touching itself,
in accordance with its own distinctive mode. Sensation as it is brought
to use by experience is no longer some inert substance or abstract
moment, but one of our surfaces of contact with being, a structure
of consciousness, and in place of one single space, as the universal
condition of all qualities, we have with each one of the latter, a
particular manner of being in space and, in a sense, of making space.

221

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

It is neither contradictory nor impossible that each sense should
constitute a small world within the larger one, and it is even in virtue
of its peculiarity that it is necessary to the whole and opens upon the
whole.

To sum up, once distinctions between the a priori and the em¬
pirical, between form and content, have been done away with, the
spaces peculiar to the senses become concrete ‘moments’ of a com¬
prehensive configuration which is the one and only space, and the
power of going to it is inseparable from that of cutting oneself off
from it by the sequestration of a sense. When, in the concert hall, I
open my eyes, visible space seems to me cramped compared to that
other space through which, a moment ago, the music was being un¬
folded, and even if I keep my eyes open while the piece is being
played, I have the impression that the music is not really contained
within this circumscribed and unimpressive space. It brings a new
dimension stealing through visible space, and in this it surges for¬
ward, just as, in victims of hallucinations, the clear space of things
perceived is mysteriously duplicated by a ‘dark space’ in which other
presences are possible. Like the perspective of other people making
its impact on the world for me, the spatial realm of each sense is an
unknowable absolute for the others, and to that extent limits their
spatiality. These descriptions, which to critical philosophy appear as
empirical oddities, leaving a priori certainties untouched, assume, as
far as we are concerned, philosophical importance, because the unity
of space can be discovered only in the interplay of the sensory
realms. That is what remains true in the celebrated empiricist de¬
scription of a non-spatial perception. The experience of persons
blind from birth and operated upon for cataract has never proved,
and could never prove, that for them space begins with sight. Yet
the patient never ceases to marvel at this visual space to which he
has just gained access, and compared to which tactile experience
seems to him so poor that he is quite prepared to admit that he has
never enjoyed the experience of space before the operation.1 The
patient’s amazement, and his hesitant attitude in the new visual
world into which he is entering, show that the sense of touch is not
spatial as is sight. ‘After the operation,’ it is said,2 ‘form as given by

1 One subject declares that the spatial notions that he thought he entertained
before the operation did not in fact give him a genuine representation of space,
and were only a species of ‘knowledge gained through the workings nf thought’.

(Von Senden, Raum- und Gestaltauffassung bei operierten Blindgeborenen vor und
nach der Operation , p. 23.) The acquisition of sight involves a general reorganiza¬
tion of existence which equally concerns touch. The world’s centre is displaced,
the tactile image is forgotten, recognition through touch is less reliable, the exis¬
tential current henceforth runs through vision, and what the patient is talking
about is this weakened sense of touch. 2 Ibid., p. 36.

222

SENSE EXPERIENCE

sight is for these patients something quite new which they fail to
relate to their tactile experience’, ‘the patient states that he can see,
but does not know what he sees. ... He never recognizes his hand
as such, and talks only about a moving, white patch.’1 To distinguish
by sight a circle from a rectangle, he has to run his eyes round the
outline of the figure, as he might with his hand,2 and he always tends
to take hold of objects set before his eyes.3 What conclusion is to be
drawn from this ? that tactile experience is no preparation for the
perception of space? But unless it were in some way spatial, would
the subject stretch out his hand towards the object shown to him?
This gesture presupposes that touch opens on to a setting at least
analogous to that of visual data. The facts show above all else that
sight is nothing unless the subject is more or less used to using his
eyes. Patients ‘at first see colours in the way that we smell an odour:
it closes round us, and acts upon us, without however filling a deter¬
minate form of a determinate extent’.4 Everything is at first confused
and apparently in motion. Discrimination between coloured surfaces
and the correct apprehension of movement do not come until later,
when the subject has learned ‘what it is to see’5 that is, when he
directs and shifts his gaze as a gaze, and no longer as a hand. This
proves that each organ of sense explores the object in its own way,
that it is the agent of a certain type of synthesis, but, short of reserv¬
ing the word space, by way of nominal definition, for the visual
synthesis, we cannot withhold from the sense of touch spatiality in
the sense of a grasp of co-existences. The very fact that the way is
paved to true vision through a phase of transition and through a sort
of touch effected by the eyes would be incomprehensible unless there
were a quasi-spatial tactile field, into which the first visual percep¬
tions may be inserted. Sight would never communicate directly with
touch, as it in fact does in the normal adult, if the sense of touch,
even when artificially isolated, were not so organized as to make co¬
existences possible. Far from ruling out the idea of a tactile space,
the facts prove on the contrary that there is a space so strictly tactile
that its articulations do not and never will stand in a relationship of
synonymity with those of visual space. Empiricist analyses present,
in a confused form, a genuine problem. The fact, for example, that
touch cannot simultaneously cover more than a small amount of
space — that of the body and its instruments — does not affect merely
the presentation of tactile space, but also changes its significance.
For the intelligence — or at least for a certain intelligence which is

1 Von Senden, Return- und Gestaltauffassung bei operierten Blindgeborenen
vor und nach der Operation, p. 93.

2 Ibid., pp. 102-4.

4 Ibid., p. 113.

3 Ibid., p. 124.
6 Ibid., p. 123.

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

that of classical physics — simultaneity is the same, whether it occurs
between two adjacent points or two remote ones, and in any case it is
possible gradually to construct with short-distance simultaneities a
long-distance one. But for experience, the thickness of time which
thus intrudes into the operation affects the result, producing a certain
‘blurring5 in the simultaneity of the extreme points, and to this extent
the breadth of visual perspectives will be a true revelation to the
patient whose blindness has been cured by operation, because it pro¬
vides a demonstration, for the first time, of remote simultaneity
itself. These patients declare that tactile objects are not genuine
spatial totalities, that the apprehension of the object is here a mere
‘knowledge of the mutual relation of parts5, that the circle and the
square are not really perceived by touch, but recognized from certain
‘signs5 — the presence or absence of ‘corners5.* 1 We conclude that the
tactile field has never the fullness of the visual, that the tactile object
is never wholly present in each of its parts as is the case with the
visual object, and in short that touching is not seeing. It is true that
the blind and the normal person talk to each other, and that it is
perhaps impossible to find a single word, even in colour vocabulary,
to which the blind man does not manage to attach at least a rough
meaning. One blind boy of twelve gives a very good definition of the
dimensions of sight: ‘Those who can see.5 he Says, ‘are related to me
through some unknown sense which completely envelops me from a
distance, follows me, goes through me, and, from the time I get up
to the time I go to bed, holds me in some way in subjection to it’ (mich
gewissermassen beherrscht).2 But such indications remain theoretical
and problematic for the blind person. They ask a question to which
only sight could provide an answer. And this is why the blind person,
having undergone his operation, finds the world different from what
he expected,3 as we always find a man different from what we have
heard about him. The blind man's world differs from the normal
person’s not only through the quantity of material at his disposal,
but also through the structure of the whole. A blind man knows quite
precisely through his sense of touch what branches and leaves, or an
arm and fingers, are. After the operation he marvels that there should
be ‘such a difference5 between a tree and a human body.4 It is clear
that sight has not only added fresh details to his knowledge of the
tree. What we are dealing with is a mode of presentation and a type
of synthesis which are new and which transfigure the object. If we

take as an example the structure ‘light-object illumined5 we shall find

only somewhat vague analogies in the realms of touch. This is why a

1 Von Senden, Return- und Gestaltaujfassung bei operierten Blindgeborenen
vor und nach der Operation , p. 29.

2 Ibid., p. 45. 3 Ibid.

224

4 Ibid., pp. 50 and ff.

SENSE EXPERIENCE

patient operated upon after being blind for eighteen years tries to
touch a ray of sunlight.1 The whole significance of our life — from
which theoretical significance is merely extracted — would be differ¬
ent if we were sightless. There is a general function of substitution and
replacement which enables us to gain access to the abstract significance
of experiences which we have not actually had, for example, to speak
of what we have not seen. But just as in the organism the renewed
functions are never the exact equivalent of the damaged ones, and
give only an appearance of total restitution, the intelligence ensures
no more than an apparent communication between different experi¬
ences, and the synthesis of visual and tactile worlds in the person
bom blind and operated upon, the constitution of an intersensory
world must be effected in the domain of sense itself, the community
of significance between the two experiences being inadequate to
ensure their union in one single experience. The senses are distinct
from each other and distinct from intellection in so far as each one
of them brings with it a structure of being which can never be exactly
transposed. We can recognize this because we have rejected formalism
of consciousness, and made the body the subject of perception.

And we can recognize it without any threat to the unity of the
senses. For the senses communicate with each other. Music is not
in visible space, but it besieges, undermines and displaces that space,
so that soon these overdressed listeners who take on a judicial air
and exchange remarks or smiles, unaware that the floor is trembling
beneath their feet, are like a ship’s crew buffeted about on the surface
of a tempestuous sea. The two spaces are distinguishable only against
the background of a common world, and can compete with each
other only because they both lay claim to total being. They are united
at the very instant in which they clash. If I try to shut myself up in
one of my senses and, for instance, project myself wholly into my
eyes, and abandon myself to the blue of the sky, soon I am unaware
that I am gazing and, just as I strive to make myself sight and nothing
but sight, the sky stops being a ‘visual perception’, to become my
world of the moment. Sensory experience is unstable, and alien to
natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body all at
once, and which opens on a world of inter-acting senses. Like that
of the sensible quality, the experience of the separate ‘senses’ is
gained only when one assumes a highly particularized attitude, and
this cannot be of any assistance to the analysis of direct conscious¬
ness. I am sitting in my room, and I look at the sheets of white paper
lying about on the table, some in the light shed through the window,
others in the shadow. If I do not analyse my perception but content

1 Von Senden, Raum - und Gestaltauffassung bei operierten Blindgeborenen
vor und nach der Operation , p. 186.

225

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

myself with the spectacle as a whole, I shall say that all the sheets of
paper look equally white. However, some of them are in the shadow
of the wall. How is it that they are not less white than the rest? I
decide to look more closely. I fix my gaze upon them, which means
that 1 restrict my visual field. I may even look at them througli a
match-box lid, which will separate them from the rest of the field, or
through a ‘reduction screen’ with a window in it. Whether I use one
of these devices or merely observe with the naked eye, provided that
in the latter case I assume the ‘analytic attitude’,* 1 the sheets change
their appearance: this is no longer white paper over which a shadow
is cast, but a grey or steely blue substance, thick and not definitely
localized. If I once more look at the general picture, I notice that the
sheets over which a shadow is thrown were at no time identical with
the sheets lying in the light, nor yet were they objectively different
from them. The whiteness of the shaded paper does not lend itself
to precise classification within the black-white range.2 It appeared
as no definite quality, and I have brought out the quality by fixing
my eyes on a portion of the visual field: then and then only have I
found myself before a certain quale which absorbs my gaze. Now
what actually is fixing one’s gaze? From the point of view of the
object, it is separating the region under scrutiny from the rest of the
field, it is interrupting the total life of the spectacle, which assigned
to each visible surface a determinate coloration, taking the light into
account; from the subject’s point of view, it is substituting for the
comprehensive vision, in which our gaze lends itself to the whole
spectacle and is permeated by it, an observation, that is, a localized
vision which it controls according to its own requirements. The
sensible quality, far from being co-extensive with perception, is the
peculiar product of an attitude of curiosity or observation. It appears
when, instead of yielding up the whole of my gaze to the world, I
turn towards this gaze itself, and when I ask myself what precisely it
is that I see\ it does not occur in the natural transactions between my
sight and the world, it is the reply to a certain kind of questioning on
the part of my gaze, the outcome of a second order or critical vision
which tries to know itself in its own particularity, of an ‘attention to
the pure -visual’,3 which I exercise either when I am afraid of being
mistaken, or when I want to undertake a scientific study of the
spectacle presented. This attitude does away with the spectacle
properly speaking: the colours which I see through the reduction
screen or those obtained by the painter when he half-closes his eves

are no longer object-colours — the colour of "the walls or the colour

1 Gelb, Die Farbenkonstanz der Sehdinge , p. 600.

2 Ibid., p. 613.

3 Einstellung auf reine Optik , Katz quoted by Gelb, op. cit., p. 600.

226

SENSE EXPERIENCE

of the paper — but coloured areas having a certain density, and all
rather vaguely localized in the same unreal plane.1 Thus there is a
natural attitude of vision in which I make common cause with my
gaze and, through it, surrender myself to the spectacle : in this case
the parts of the field are linked in an organization which makes them
recognizable and identifiable. The quality, the separate sensory
impact occurs when I break this total structuralization of my vision,
when I cease to adhere to my own gaze, and when, instead of living
the vision, I question myself about it, I want to try out my possi¬
bilities, I break the link between my vision and the world, between
myself and my vision, in order to catch and describe it. When I have
taken up this attitude, at the same time as the world is atomized into
sensible qualities, the natural unity of the perceiving subject is
broken up, and I reach the stage of being unaware of myself as the
subject of a visual field. Now just as, within each sense, we must find
the natural unity which it offers, we shall reveal a ‘primary layer’ of
sense experience which precedes its division among the separate
senses.2 According as I fix my eyes on an object or allow them to
wander, or else wholly submit myself to the event, the same colour
appears to me as superficial ( Oberfldchenfarbe ) — being in a definite
location in space, and extending over an object — or else it becomes
an atmospheric colour ( Raumfarbe ) and diffuses itself all round the
object. Or I may feel it in my eye as a vibration of my gaze; or finally
it may pass on to my body a similar manner of being, fully pervading
me, so that it is no longer entitled to be called a colour. Similarly
there is an objective sound which reverberates outside me in the
instrument, an atmospheric sound which is between the object and
my body, a sound which vibrates in me ‘as if I had become the flute
or the clock’ ; and finally a last stage in which the acoustic element
disappears and becomes the highly precise experience of a change
permeating my whole body.3 The sensory experience has only a
narrow margin at its disposal: either the sound and the colour,
through their own arrangement, throw an object into relief, such as an
ashtray or a violin, and this object speaks directly to all the senses;
or else, at the opposite end of experience, the sound and the colour
are received into my body, and it becomes difficult to limit my ex¬
perience to a single sensory department: it spontaneously overflows
towards all the rest. The sensory experience, at the third stage just
described, is distinguished only by an ‘accent’ which is indicative
rather of the direction of the sound or the colour.4 At this level, the

1 Einstellung auf reine Optik, Katz quoted by Gelb, op. cit., p. 600.

2 Werner, Untersuchungen uber Empfindung und Empfinden, I, p. 1 55.

3 Ibid., p. 157.

4 Ibid., p. 162.

227

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

ambiguity of experience is such that an audible rhythm causes cine¬
matograph pictures to run together and produces a perception of
movement whereas, without auditory support, the same succession
of images would be too slow to give rise to stroboscopic movement.1
The sounds modify the consecutive images of the colours: a louder
note intensifies them, the interruption of the sound produces a waver¬
ing effect in them, and a low note makes blue darker or deeper.2
The constancy hypothesis,3 which allows to each stimulus one sensa¬
tion and one only, is progressively less verifiable as natural percep¬
tion is approached. Tt is in so far as conduct is intellectual and im¬
partial (sachlicher) that the constancy hypothesis becomes accep¬
table as regards the relation of stimulus to specific sensory response,
and that the auditory stimulus, for instance, is limited to its specific
sphere, in this case the acoustic one.’4 The influence of mescalin, by
weakening the attitude of impartiality and surrendering the subject
to his vitality, should therefore favour forms of synaesthetic experi¬
ence. And indeed, under mescalin, the sound of a flute gives a bluish-
green colour, the tick of a metronome, in darkness, is translated as
grey patches, the spatial intervals between them corresponding to the
intervals of time between the ticks, the size of the patch to the loud¬
ness of the tick, and its height to the pitch of the sound.5 A subject
under mescalin finds a piece of iron, strikes the window-sill with it
and exclaims: ‘This is magic’: the trees are growing greener.6 The
barking of a dog is found to attract light in an indescribable way, and
is re-echoed in the right foot.7 It is as if one could sometimes see ‘the
occasional collapse of the barriers established, in the course of evolu¬
tion, between the senses.0 Seen in the perspective of the objective
world, with its opaque qualities, and the objective body with its
separate organs, the phenomenon of synaesthetic experience is para¬
doxical. The attempt is therefore made to explain it independently
of the concept of sensation: it is thought necessary, for example, to
suppose that the excitations ordinarily restricted to one region of the
brain — the optical or auditory zone — become capable of playing a
part outside these limits, and that in this way a specific quality is
associated with a non-specific one. Whether or not this explanation

1 Zietz and Werner, Die dynamische Struktur der Bewegung.

2 Werner, op. cit., p. 163.

3 Cf. above. Introduction, section I.

4 Werner, op. cit., p. 154.

0 Stem, rathotogie der Wahrnemungy p. 4 £L.

8 Mayer-Gross and Stein, Ober einige Abanderungen der Sinnestdtigkeit im

Meskalinrauschy p. 385.

7 Ibid.

0 Ibid.

228

SENSE EXPERIENCE

is supported by arguments drawn from brain physiology,1 this ex¬
planation does not account for synaesthetic experience, which thus
becomes one more occasion for questioning the concept of sensation
and objective thought. For the subject does not say only that he has the
sensation both of a sound and a colour: it is the sound itself that he sees
where colours are formed .2 This formulation is literally meaningless
if vision is defined by the visual quale , and the sound by the acoustic
quale . But it rests with us to word our definition in such a way as to
provide it with a meaning, since the sight of sounds and the hearing
of colours exist as phenomena. Nor are these even exceptional
phenomena. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware
of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of
experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally
speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and
the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear and
feel.

Sight, it is said, can bring us only colours or lights, and with them
forms which are the outlines of colours, and movements which are
the patches of colour changing position. But how shall we place
transparency or ‘muddy’ colours in the scale ? In reality, each colour,
in its inmost depths, is nothing but the inner "structure of the thing
overtly revealed. The brilliance of gold palpably holds out to us its
homogeneous composition, and the dull colour of wood its hetero¬
geneous make-up.3 The senses intercommunicate by opening on to
the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of
glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is con¬
veyed by the visible glass.4 One sees the springiness of steel, the duc¬
tility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane blade, the softness of
shavings. The form of objects is not their geometrical shape: it
stands in a certain relation to their specific nature, and appeals to all
our other senses as well as sight. The form of a fold in linen or cotton
shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre, the coldness or warmth
of the material. Furthermore, the movement of visible objects is not
the mere transference from place to place of coloured patches which,

1 It is for example possible that under mescalin a modification of the chronaxies
might be observable. This fact would in no way count as an explanation of syn-
aesthesia in terms of the objective body, if, as we shall show, the juxtaposition of
several sensible qualities fails to make clear to us perceptual ambivalence as it is
presented to us in synaesthetic experience. The change in the chronaxies could
not be the cause of synaesthesia, but the objective expression or sign of a more
profound and all-embracing event, which has no seat in the objective body, but
which is relevant to the phenomenal body as a vehicle of being in the world.

2 Werner, op. cit., p. 163.

3 Schapp, Be it rage zur Phcinomenologie der Wahrnehmung , pp. 23 and ff.

4 Ibid., p. 11.

229

T1IE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

in the visual field, correspond to those objects. In the jerk of the
twig from which a bird has just flown, we read its flexibility or elas¬
ticity, and it is thus that a branch of an apple-tree or a birch are im¬
mediately distinguishable. One sees the weight of a block of cast iron
which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of
syrup.1 In the same way, I hear the hardness and unevenness of
cobbles in the rattle of a carriage, and we speak appropriately of a
‘soft’, ‘dull’ or ‘sharp’ sound. Though one may doubt whether the
sense of hearing brings us genuine ‘things’, it is at least certain that it
presents us, beyond the sounds in space, with something which
‘murmurs’, and in this way communicates with the other senses.2
Finally, if, with my eyes closed, I bend a steel bar and a lime branch,
I perceive in my hands the most essential texture of the metal and the
wood. If, then, taken as incomparable qualities, the ‘data of the
different senses’ belong to so many separate worlds, each one in its
particular essence being a manner of modulating the thing, they all
communicate through their significant core.

We must, however, give a clearer account of the nature of sensible
significance, otherwise we shall merely slip back into the intellec¬
tuals analysis which we rejected earlier. The table which I touch is
the same one as the table which I see. But must one go on to say, as
has in fact been said : the sonata which I hear is the same one as Helen
Keller touches, and the man I sec is the same one as the blind painter
paints 7 3 Gradually we should come to find that there was no longer
any difference between the perceptual and the intellectual syntheses.
The unity of the senses would then be of the same order as the unity
of the objects of science. When I both touch and look at an object,
it would be said, the single object is the common ground of these two
appearances as Venus is the common ground of the Morning Star
and the Evening Star, and so perception would be an incipient
science.4 Now, though perception brings together our sensory ex¬
periences into a single world, it does not do so in the way that
scientific colligation gathers together objects or phenomena, but in
the way that binocular vision grasps one sole object. Let us describe
carefully this ‘synthesis’. When my gaze is fixed on a remote thing,
I have a double image of objects nearby. When I transfer my gaze to
the latter, I see the two images converge on what is to be the single
object, and merge into it. We must not at this point say that the
synthesis consists in thinking of them together as images of one

1 Schapp, Beitrage zur Phanomenologie der Wahrnehmung , pp. 21 and ff.

2 Ibid., pp. 32-3.

3 Specht, Zur Phanomenologie und Morphologie der pathologischen Wahrnehm -
ungstauschungen , p. 11.

4 Alain, 81 Chapitres sur V Esprit et les Passions , p. 38.

230

SENSE EXPERIENCE

single object; if we were dealing with a mental act or an apperception,
this ought to occur as soon as I notice the identity of the two images,
whereas I have to wait much longer for the unity of the object to
appear: until the moment when correct focusing does away with
them. The single object is not a certain way of thinking of the two
images, since they cease to be given the moment it appears. Has the
‘fusion of images’ been effected, then, by some innate device of the
nervous system, and do we mean that finally we have, if not on the
periphery, at least at the centre, one sole excitation mediated by the
two eyes ? But the mere existence of one visual centre cannot explain
the single object, since double vision sometimes occurs, as moreover
the mere existence of two retinas cannot explain double vision, since
it is not a constant phenomenon.1 If double vision as well as the
single object can be included in normal vision, this is not attributable
to the anatomical lay-out of the visual apparatus, but to its function¬
ing and to the use which the psychosomatic subject makes of it.
Shall we then say that double sight occurs because our eyes do not
converge on the object, and because it throws non-symmetrical
images on our two retinas? And that these two images merge into
ope because fixation brings them back to corresponding points on the
two retinas ? But are divergence and convergence of the eyes the cause
or the effect of double and normal vision? In the case of people born
blind and operated on for cataract, it is impossible to say, during the
period following the operation, whether it is non-co-ordination of the
eyes which hampers vision, or whether it is the confusion in the visual
field which favours non-co-ordination — whether they fail to see
through failure to focus, or whether they fail to focus through not
having anything to see. When I focus on the remote distance and, for
example, one of my fingers held near my eyes throws its image on
non-symmetrical points on my retinas, the arrangement of images on
the retinas cannot be the cause of the action of focusing which will
put an end to the double vision. For, as has been pointed out,2 the
disappearance of images does not exist in itself. My finger forms its
image on a certain area of my left retina, and on an area of my
right retina which is not symmetrical with the former. But the sym¬
metrical area of the right retina is also full of visual excitations, the
distribution of stimuli on the two retinas is ‘dissymmetrical’ only to a
subject who compares the two groupings and identifies them. On the

1 ‘The convergence of the conductors as it exists does not condition the non¬
distinction of images in simple binocular vision, since a rivalry between the mon¬
ocular visions can take place, and the separation of the retinas does not account
for their distinction when it occurs, since, normally, when nothing varies in
receptor and conductors, this distinction is not made.’ R. D6jean, Etude
psychologique de la distance dans la vision , p. 74.

2 Koff ka, Some Problems of Space Perception , p. 1 79.

231

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

retinas themselves, considered as objects, there are only two group¬
ings of stimuli that cannot be compared. It will perhaps be replied
that, unless the eyes are focused, these two groupings cannot be
superimposed on each other, nor give rise to the vision of anything,
and that in this sense their presence alone creates a state of un¬
balance, But this is admitting what we are trying to show: that the
sight of one single object is not a simple outcome of focusing the eyes,
that it is anticipated in the very act of focusing, or that, as has been
stated, the focusing of the gaze is a ‘prospective activity’.1 For my
gaze to alight on near objects and to focus my eyes on them, it must
experience double vision as an unbalance2 or as an imperfect vision,
and tend towards the single object as towards the release of tension
and the completion of vision. ‘It is necessary to “look” in order to
see.’ 3 The unity of the object in binocular vision is not, therefore, the
result of some third person process which eventually produces a
single image through the fusion of two monocular images. When we
go from diplopia to normal vision, the single object replaces the two
images, one is clearly not superimposed on the other: it is not of
the same order as they, but is incomparably more substantial. The
two images of diplopia are not amalgamated into one single one in
binocular vision; the unity of the object is intentional. But — and
this is the point we are trying to make — it is not therefore a notional
unity. We pass from double vision to the single object, not through
an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function
each on its own account and are used as a single organ by one single
gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the syn¬
thesis, but the body, when it escapes from dispersion, pulls itself
together and tends by all means in its power towards one single goal
of its activity, and when one single intention is formed in it through
the phenomenon of synergy. We withdraw this synthesis from the
objective body only to transfer it to the phenomenal body, the body,
that is, in so far as it projects a certain ‘setting’ round itself,4 in so
far as its ‘parts’ are dynamically acquainted with each other, and its

1 R. D£jean, op. cit., pp. 110-1 1 . The author says : ‘a prospective activity of the
mind’, and on this point it will be seen that we do not follow him.

2 It is known that Gestalt psychology bases this orientated process on some
physical phenomenon in the ‘combination zone’. We have said elsewhere that it
is contradictory to recall the psychologist to the variety of phenomena or struc¬
tures, and to explain them all in terms of some of their number, in this case

physical fomta. The focus as a temporal form is not a physical or physiological

fact for the simple reason that all the forms belong to the phenomenal world.
Cf. on this point La Structure du Comportement , pp. 175 and ff., 191 and ff.

2 R. Dejean, ibid.

4 In so far as there is an ‘Umweltintentionalitat’, Buytendijk and Plessner,
Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks, p. 81.

232

SENSE EXPERIENCE

receptors are so arranged as to make possible, through their synergy,
the perception of the object. What is meant by saying that this in-
tentionality is not a thought is that it does not come into being
through the transparency of any consciousness, but takes for
granted all the latent knowledge of itself that my body possesses.
Being supported by the prelogical unity of the body image, the per¬
ceptual synthesis no more holds the secret of the object than it does
that of one's own body, and this is why the perceived object always
presents itself as transcendent, and why the synthesis seems to be
effected on the object itself, in the world, and not at that metaphysical
point occupied by the thinking subject. Herein lies the distinction
between the perceptual synthesis and the intellectual. On passing
from double to normal vision, I am not simply aware of seeing with
my two eyes the same object, I am aware of progressing towards the
object itself and finally enjoying its concrete presence. Monocular
images float vaguely in front of things, having no real place in the
world; then suddenly they fall back towards a certain location in
the world and are swallowed up in it, as ghosts, at daybreak, repair
to the rift in the earth which let them forth. The binocular object, in
which the synthesis occurs, absorbs the monocular images, which, in
this new light, finally recognize themselves as appearances of that
object. My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and
the synthesis takes place not in so far as they all express a certain
invariant, and in the identity of the object, but in that they are all
collected together, by the last of their number, in the ipseity of the
thing. The ipseity is, of course, never reached: each aspect of the
thing which falls to our perception is still only an invitation to per¬
ceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the perceptual process.
If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that moment
arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist
as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What
makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches
it from our grasp. The aseity of the thing, its unchallengeable presence
and the perpetual absence into which it withdraws, are two insepar¬
able aspects of transcendence. Intellectualism overlooks both, and if
we want to account for the thing as the transcendent terminus of an
open series of experiences, we must provide the subject of percep¬
tion with the unity of the body image, which is itself open and
limitless. That is what we learn from the synthesis of binocular
vision.

Let us apply it to the problem of the unity of the senses. It cannot
be understood in terms of their subsumption under a primary con¬
sciousness, but of their never-ending integration into one knowing
organism. The intersensory object is to the visual object what the

233

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

visual object is to the monocular images of double vision,1 and the
senses interact in perception as the two eyes collaborate in vision.
The sight of sounds or the hearing of colours come about in the same
way as the unity of the gaze through the two eyes: in so far as my
body is, not a collection of adjacent organs, but a synergic system,
all the functions of which are exercised and linked together in the
general action of being in the world, in so far as it is the congealed
face of existence. There is a sense in saying that I see sounds or hear
colours so long as sight or hearing is not the mere possession of an
opaque quale, but the experience of a modality of existence, the syn¬
chronisation of my body with it, and the problem of forms of syn-
aesthetic experience begins to look like being solved if the experience
of quality is that of a certain mode of movement or of a form of
conduct. When I say that I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibra¬
tion of the sound with my whole sensory being, and particularly with
that sector of myself which is susceptible to colours. Movement,
understood not as objective movement and transference in space, but
as a project towards movement or ‘potential movement’2 forms the
basis for the unity of the senses. It is fairly well known that the talking
film not only adds a sound accompaniment to the show, but also
changes the tenor of the show itself. When I go to see a film ‘dubbed’
in French, I do not merely notice the discrepancy between word and
image, I suddenly have the impression that something else is being
said over there. The ‘dubbed’ text, though it fills the auditorium and
my ears, has not even an auditory existence for me, and I have ears
for nothing but those other soundless words that emanate from the
screen. When a breakdown of sound all at once cuts off the voice
from a character who nevertheless goes on gesticulating on the screen,
not only does the meaning of his speech suddenly escape me : the
spectacle itself is changed. The face which was so recently alive
thickens and freezes, and looks nonplussed, while the interruption
of the sound invades the screen as a quasi-stupor. For the spectator,
the gestures and words are not subsumed under some ideal signi¬
ficance, the words take up the gesture and the gesture the words, and

1 It is true that the senses should not be put on the same basis, as if they were
all equally capable of objectivity and accessible to intentionality. Experience does
not present them to us as equivalent: I think that visual experience is truer than
tactile experience, that it gamers within itself its own truth and adds to it, because
its richer structure offers me modalities of being unsuspected by touch. The unity
of the senses is achieved transversally, according to their own structure. But
something 1 1 lie it is luunil m hinoculnr vision, if it is true lhat we have ft ’directing

eye’ which brings the other under its control. These two facts — the taking over of
sensory experiences in general in visual experience, and that of the functions of
one eye by the other — prove that the unity of experience is not a formal unity,
but a primary organization.

8 Palagyi, Stein.

234

SENSE EXPERIENCE

they inter-communicate through the medium of my body. Like the
sensory aspects of my body they are immediately and mutually sym¬
bolical, precisely because my body is a ready-made system of equiva¬
lents and transpositions from one sense to another. The senses trans¬
late each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually
comprehensible without the intervention of any idea. These remarks
enable us to appreciate to the full Herder’s words: ‘Man is a per¬
manent sensorium commune , who is affected now from one quarter,
now from another.1 With the notion of the body image we find that
not only is the unity of the body described in a new way, but also,
through this, the unity of the senses and of the object. My body is
the seat or rather the very actuality of the phenomenon of expression
( Ausdruck ), and there the visual and auditory experiences, for ex¬
ample, are pregnant one with the other, and their expressive value is
the ground of the antepredicative unity of the perceived world, and,
through it, of verbal expression ( Darstellung ) and intellectual signi-
cance ( Bedeutung ).2 My body is the fabric into which all objects are
woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general
instrument of my ‘comprehension’.

It is my body which gives significance not only to the natural
object, but also to cultural objects like words. If a word is shown
to a subject for too short a time for him to be able to read it, the
word ‘warm’, for example, induces a kind of experience of warmth
which surrounds him with something in the nature of a meaningful
halo.3 The word ‘hard’4 produces a sort of stiffening of the back and
neck, and only in a secondary way does it project itself into the visual
or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or a word.
Before becoming the symbol of a concept it is first of all an event
which grips my body, and this grip circumscribes the area of signi¬
ficance to which it has reference. One subject states that on presenta¬
tion of the world ‘damp’ ( feucht ), he experiences, in addition to a
feeling of dampness and coldness, a whole rearrangement of the body
image, as if the inside of the body came to the periphery, and as if the
reality of the body, until then concentrated into his arms and legs,
were in search of a new balance of its parts. The word is then indis¬
tinguishable from the attitude which it induces, and it is only when
its presence is prolonged that it appears in the guise of an external
image, and its meaning as a thought. Words have a physiognomy
because we adopt towards them, as towards each person, a certain

1 Quoted by Werner, op. cit., p. 152.

2 The distinction between Ausdruck , Darstellung and Bedeutung is made by
Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen For men, III.

3 Werner, op. cit., pp. 160 and ff.

4 German ‘hart\

235

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

form of behaviour which makes its complete appearance the moment
each word is given. ‘I try to grasp the word rot (red) in its living ex¬
pression; but at first it is no more than peripheral for me, no more
than a sign along with the knowledge of its meaning. It is not red
itself. But suddenly I notice that the word pushes its way through my
body. I have the feeling, difficult to describe, of a kind of numbed
fullness which invades my body, and which at the same time imparts
to my mouth cavity a spherical shape. And, precisely at that moment,
I notice that the word on the paper takes on its expressive value, it
comes to meet me in a dark red halo, while the letter o intuitively
presents me with that spherical cavity which I previously felt in my
mouth.’1 What is particularly brought out by the word’s behaviour
here is its indissoluble identity with something said, heard and seen.
‘The word as read is not a geometrical structure in a segment of
visual space, it is the presentation of a form of behaviour and of a
linguistic act in its dynamic fullness.’2 Whether it is a question of
perceiving words or more generally objects, ‘there is a certain bodily
attitude, a specific kind of dynamic tension which is necessary to
give structure to the image; man, as a dynamic and living totality
has to “pattern” himself in order to trace out a figure in his visual
field as part of the psychosomatic organism’.3 In short, my body is
not only an object among all other objects, a nexus of sensible quali¬
ties among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest,
which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides
words with their primordial significance through the way in which it
receives them. It is not a matter of reducing the significance of the
word ‘warm’ to sensations of warmth by empiricist standards. For the
warmth which I feel when I read the word ‘warm’ is not an actual
warmth. It is simply my body which prepares itself for heat and
which, so to speak, roughs out its outline. In the same way, when a
part of my body is mentioned to me, or when I represent it to myself,
I experience in the corresponding part a quasi-sensation of contact
which is merely the emergence of that part of my body into the total
body image. We are not, then reducing the significance of the word,

1 Werner, Untersuchung uber Empfindung und Empfinden , II, Die Rolle der
Sprachempfindung im Prozess der Gestaltung ausdrucksmassig erlebter Worter , p.
238.

2 Ibid., p. 239. What has been said of the word is even truer of the sentence.

Before even having read through the sentence, we can say that it is ‘journalese’

(ihid p p. Tl. Wfl cim understand n phrase or nr tear.! yi vt: ii n cram in mi>arti.iF

by going from the whole to the parts. Not, as Bergson says, because we evolve a
‘hypothesis’ on the strength of the first words, but because we have an organ of
language which takes on the linguistic shape of what is set before it, as our organs
of sense are given a direction by the stimulus and are synchronized with it.

3 Ibid., p. 230.

236

SENSE EXPERIENCE

or even of the percept, to a collection of ‘bodily sensations’ but we
are saying that the body, in so far as it has ‘behaviour patterns’, is
that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of
symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently ‘be
at home in’ that world, ‘understand’ it and find significance in it.

All this, it will be said, has doubtless some value as description of
appearance. But how does that help if, in the end, these descriptions
mean nothing that can be conceived, and if on reflection they are
dismissed as nonsense? As popularly conceived one’s own body is
both a constituted and constituting object in relation to other objects.
But if we are to know what we are talking about, we must choose
and, in the last analysis, assign it to the sphere of the constituted
object. I do, in fact, one of two things. Either I consider myself as
within the world, inserted into it by my body which is beset by casual
relations, in which case ‘the senses’ and ‘the body’ are material in¬
struments which have no knowledge of anything; the object throws
an image on to the retinas, and the retinal image is duplicated in the
optical centre by a second image, but all this consists of nothing but
things to see and nobody who sees, so that we are thrown back in-
defi nitely from one bodily stage to another, conjecturing within man
a ‘V'ittle man’, and within him a smaller one, without ever reaching
^lght. Or else I try really to understand how sight comes about, in
which case I must get away from the constituted, from what is in
itself 1 and seize by reflection a being for whom the object can exist.
Now, for the object to exist in the eyes of the subject, it is not enough
for this ‘subject’ to fix his eyes on it or grasp it as my hand grasps
this piece of wood, he must in addition know that he is seizing or
watching it, he must know himself seizing or watching, his action
must be entirely given to himself, and finally this subject must be
nothing other than what he is conscious of being, otherwise we should
have a seizure or a contemplation of the object for some third party,
while the alleged subject, being unaware of himself, would be dis¬
persed through his act and unconscious of anything. For there to be
any sight or tactile perception of the object, the senses will always
Lack that dimension of absence, that unreality through which the
subject may be self-knowledge and the object may exist for Mm. The
consciousness of the unified presupposes consciousness of the unify¬
ing agent and of his act of unification; consciousness of the object
presupposes self-consciousness, or rather they are synonymous. In so
far, then, as there is consciousness of something, it is because the subject
is absolutely nothing and the ‘sensations’, the ‘material’ of knowledge
are not phases or inhabitants of consciousness, they are part of the
constituted world. Of what avail are our descriptions against these
self-evident truths and how could they escape from this dilemma?

237

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

Let us return to the perceptual experience. I perceive this table on
which I am writing. This means, among other things, that my act of
perception occupies me, and occupies me sufficiently for me to be
unable, while I am actually perceiving the table, to perceive myself
perceiving it. When I want to do this, I cease, so to speak, to use my
gaze in order to plunge into the table, I turn my back towards myself
who am perceiving, and then realize that my perception must have
gone through certain subjective appearances, and interpreted certain
of my own ‘sensations’; in short it takes its place in the perspective of
my individual history. I start from unified experience and from there
acquire, in a secondary way, consciousness of a unifying activity
when, taking up an analytical attitude, i break up perception into
qualities and sensations, and when, in order to recapture on the basis
of these the object into which I was in the first place blindly thrown,
I am obliged to suppose an act of synthesis which is merely the
counterpart of my analysis. My act of perception, in its unsophis¬
ticated form, does not itself bring about this synthesis; it takes ad¬
vantage of work already done, of a general synthesis constituted once
and for all, and this is what I mean when I say that I perceive witii
my body or my senses, since my body and my senses are precisely
that familiarity with the world born of habit, that implicit or sedi¬
mentary body of knowledge. If my consciousness were at presend-
constituting the world which it perceives, no distance would separate
them and there would be no possible discrepancy between them; it
would find its way into the world’s hidden concatenations, inten¬
tionally would carry us to the heart of the object, and simultaneously
the percept would lose the thickness conferred by the present, and
consciousness would not be lost and become bogged down in it. But
what we in fact have is consciousness of an inexhaustible object, and
we are sucked into it because, between it and us, there is this latent
knowledge which our gaze uses — the possibility of its rational de¬
velopment being a mere matter of presumption on our part — and
which remains for ever anterior to our perception. If, as we have said,
every perception has something anonymous in it, this is because it
makes use of something which it takes for granted. The person who
perceives is not spread out before himself as a consciousness must
be; he has historical density, he takes up a perceptual tradition and
is faced with a present. In perception we do not think the object and
we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object

and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are
about the world, and about the motives we have and the means at
our disposal for synthesizing it. That is why we said with Herder that
man is a sensorium commune . In this primary layer of sense experience
which is discovered only provided that we really coincide with the

238

SENSE EXPERIENCE

act of perception and break with the critical attitude, I have the living
experience of the unity of the subject and the intersensory unity of the
thing, and do not conceive them after the fashion of analytical reflec¬
tion and science* But what is the unified without unification, what is
this object which is not yet an object for someone? Pyschological re¬
flection, which posits my act of perception as an event in my personal
history, may well be a second order thing. But transcendental reflec¬
tion, which reveals me as the non-temporal thinker o f the object, brings
nothing to it which is not already there : it restricts itself to the formu¬
lation of what gives significance to ‘the table’ and ‘the chair’, what
underlies their stable structure and makes my experience of objectivity
possible. In short, what is living the unity of the object or the subject,
if it is not making it? Even if it be supposed that this unity makes its
appearance with the phenomenon of my body, must 1 not think of it
in my body in order to find it there, and must I not effect the synthesis
of this phenomenon in order to have the experience of it? Wc are
not trying to derive the for itself from the in itself nor are we return¬
ing to some form of empiricism; the body to which we are entrusting
the synthesis of the perceived world is not a pure datum, a tiling
passively received. For us the perceptual synthesis is a temporal
synthesis, and subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing but
temporality, and this is what enables us to leave to the subject of
perception his opacity and historicity. 1 open my eyes on to my
table, and my consciousness is Hooded with colours and confused
reflections; it is hardly distinguishable from what is offered to it; it
spreads out, through its accompanying body, into the spectacle
which so far is not a spectacle of anything. Suddenly, I start to focus
my eyes on the table which is not yet there, I begin to look into the
distance while there is as yet no depth, my body centres itself on an
object which is still only potential, and so disposes its sensitive sur¬
faces as to make it a present reality. I can thus re-assign to its place
in the world the something which was impinging upon me, because
I can, by slipping into the future, throw into the immediate past the
world’s first attack upon my senses, and direct myself towards the
determinate object as towards a near future. The act of looking is
indivisibly prospective, since the object is the final stage of my
process of focusing, and retrospective, since it will present itself as
preceding its own appearance, as the ‘stimulus’, the motive or the
prime mover of every process since its beginning. The spatial syn¬
thesis and the synthesis of the object are based on this unfolding of
time. In every focusing movement my body unites present, past and
future, it secretes time, or rather it becomes that location in nature
where, for the first time, events, instead of pushing each other into
the realm of being, project round the present a double horizon of

239

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

past and future and acquire a historical orientation. There is here
indeed the summoning, but not the experience, of an eternal natura
naturans, My body takes possession of time; it brings into existence
a past and a future for a present; it is not a thing, but creates time
instead of submitting to it. But every act of focusing must be re¬
newed, otherwise it falls into unconsciousness. The object remains
clearly before me provided that I run my eyes over it, free-ranging
scope being an essential property of the gaze. The hold which it gives
us upon a segment of time, the synthesis which it effects are them¬
selves temporal phenomena which pass, and can be recaptured only
in a fresh act which is itself temporal. The claim to objectivity laid
by each perceptual act is remade by its successor, again disappointed
and once more made. This ever-recurrent failure of perceptual con¬
sciousness was foreseeable from the start. If I cannot see the object
except by distancing it in the past, this is because, like the first attack
launched by the object upon my senses, the succeeding perception
equally occupies and expunges my consciousness; it is because this
perception will in turn pass away, the subject of perception never
being an absolute subjectivity, but being destined to become an
object for an ulterior 7. Perception is always in the mode of the im¬
personal ‘One’. It is not a personal act enabling me to give a fresh
significance to my life. The person who, in sensory exploration, gives
a past to the present and directs it towards a future, is not myself as
an autonomous subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am
able to ‘look’. Rather than being a genuine history, perception ratifies
and renews in us a ‘prehistory’. And that again is of die essence of
time: there would be no present, that is to say, no sensible world
with its thickness and inexhaustible richness, if perception, in Hegel’s
words, did not retain a past in the depth, of the present, and did not
contract that past into that depth. It fails at this moment to realize the
synthesis of its object, not because it is the passive recipient of it, as
empiricists would have it, but because the unity of'the object makes
its appearance through the medium of time, and because time slips
away as fast as it catches up with itself. It is true that I find, through
time, later experiences interlocking with earlier ones and carrying
them further, but nowhere do I enjoy absolute possession of myself
by myself, since the hollow void of the future is for ever being refilled
with a fresh present. There is no related object without relation and
without subject, no unity without unification, but everv synthesis is

both LApludeU ami rebuilt by time which, with one and the same

process, calls it into question and confirms it because it produces a
new present which retains the past. The duality of naturahi and
naturans is therefore converted into a dialectic of constituted and
constituting time. If we are to solve the problem which we have set

240

SENSE EXPERIENCE

ourselves — that of sensoriality, or finite subjectivity — it will be by
thinking about time and showing how it exists only for a subjec¬
tivity, since without the latter, the past in itself being no longer and
the future in itself being not yet, there would be no time — and how
nevertheless this subject is time itself, and how we can say with Hegel
that time is the existence of mind, or refer with Husserl to a self¬
constitution of time.

For the moment, the preceding descriptions and those which are to
follow serve to make us familiar with a new type of reflection from
which we await the solution of our problems. For intellectualism,
reflecting is distancing or objectifying sensation and confronting it
with a subject without content capable of ranging over this diversity
and for whom the latter can exist. In so far as intellectualism purifies
consciousness by delivering it of all opacity, it makes a genuine thing
out of the hyle9 and the apprehension of any concrete contents, the
coming together of this thing and the mind, becomes inconceivable.
If it be objected that the material of knowledge is a result of analysis
and should not be treated as a real element, it has to be recognized
that in a corresponding way the synthetic unity of apperception is
also a theoretical version of experience, that it should not be given
any first-hand value and, in short, that the theory of knowledge has
to be begun all over again. We agree that the matter and form of
knowledge are results of analysis. I posit the stuff of knowledge
when, breaking away from the primary faith inspired by perception,
I adopt a critical attitude towards it and ask ‘what I am really seeing*.
The task of a radical reflection, the kind that aims at seif-compre¬
hension, consists, paradoxically enough, in recovering the unre-
flective experience of the world, and subsequently reassigning to it
the verificatory attitude and reflective operations, and displaying re¬
flection as one possibility of my being. What have we then at the out¬
set? Not a given manifold with a synthetic apperception which
ranges over it and completely penetrates it, but a certain perceptual
field against the background of a world. Nothing here is thematized.
Neither object nor subject is posited. In the primary field we have not
a mosaic of qualities, but a total configuration which distributes
functional values according to the demands of the whole; for ex¬
ample, as we have seen, a ‘white’ paper in the shade is not white in the
sense of possessing an objective quality, but it counts as white. What
is called sensation is only the most rudimentary of perceptions, and,
as a modality of existence, it is no more separable than any other
perception from a background which is in fact the world. Corre¬
spondingly each act of perception appears to itself to be picked out
from some all-embracing adherence to the world. At the centre of
this system lies the ability to suspend vital communication, or at least

241

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

to limit it, by concentrating our gaze on a part of the spectacle and
devoting the whole of the perceptual field to it. We must not, as we
have seen, suppose that the determinate forms reached through the
critical attitude are realized in the primordial experience, or, in con¬
sequence, talk about a synthesis which is present, so long as the mani¬
fold is as yet undissociated. Must we then reject the idea of synthesis
and of a stuff of knowledge? Are we to say that perception reveals
objects as a light illuminates them in the night, are we to adopt for
our own purposes that realism which, according to Malebranche,
leads us to imagine the soul issuing through the eyes and exploring
objects in the world? That would not rid us of even the idea of syn¬
thesis since, in order to perceive a surface, for example, it is not
enough to explore it, we must keep in mind the moments of our ex¬
ploratory journey and relate the points on the surface to each other.
But we have seen that primary perception is a non-thetic,* pre¬
objective and pre-conscious experience. Let us therefore say pro¬
visionally that there is a merely possible stuff of knowledge. From
every point of the primordial field intentions move outwards, vacant
and yet determinate; in realizing these intentions, analysis will arrive
at the object of science, at sensation as a private phenomenon, and
at the pure subject which posits both. These three terminal concepts
are no nearer than on the horizon of primordial experience. It is in
the experience of the thing that the reflective ideal of positing thought
will have its basis. Hence reflection does not itself grasp its full signi¬
ficance unless it refers to the unreflective fund of experience which it
presupposes, upon which it draws, and which constitutes for it a
kind of original past, a past which has never been a present.

* I.e. non-positing (Translator’s note).

242

SPACE

WE have just recognized that analysis has no justification for positing
any stuff of knowledge as an ideally separable ‘moment’ and that this
stuff, when brought into being by an act of reflection, already relates
to the world. Reflection does not follow in the reverse direction a path
already traced by the constitutive act, and the natural reference of the
stuff to the world leads us to a new conception of intentionality, since
the classical conception,1 which treats the experience of the world as
a pure act of constituting consciousness, manages to do so only in so
far as it defines consciousness as absolute non-being, and corre¬
spondingly consigns its contents to a ‘hyletic layer’ which belongs to
opaque being. We must now approach this new intentionality in a
more direct way by examining the symmetrical notion of a form of
perception, and in particular the notion of space. Kant tried to draw
a strict demarcation line between space as the form of external ex¬
perience and the things given within that experience. There is natur¬
ally no question of a relationship of container to content, since this
relationship exists only between objects, iior even a relationship of
logical inclusion, like the one existing between the individual and the
class, since space is anterior to its alleged parts, which are always
carved out of it. Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which
things are arranged, but the means whereby the positing of things
becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of
ether in which all things float, or conceiving it abstractly as a charac¬
teristic that they have in common, we must think of it as the uni¬
versal power enabling them to be connected. Therefore, either I do
not reflect, but live among things and vaguely regard space at one
moment as the setting for things, at another as their common attri¬
bute — or else I do reflect: I catch space at its source, and think at the

1 By this we understand either that of a Kantian like P. Lachieze-Rey (U Ideal-
isme kantien ), or that of Husserl in the second period of his philosophy (the period
of the Ideen).

243

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

moment of the relationships which underlie this word, realizing then
that they live only through the medium of a subject who shall de¬
scribe and sustain them, and passing from spatialized to spatializing
space. In the first case, my body and things, their concrete relation¬
ships expressed in such terms as top and bottom, right and left, near
and far, may appear to me as an irreducibly manifold variety, where¬
as in the second case I discover a single and indivisible ability to de¬
scribe space. In the first case, I am concerned with physical space,
with its regions of varied quality; in the second with geometrical
space having interchangeable dimensions, homogeneous and iso¬
tropic, and here I can at least think of a pure change of place which
would leave the moving body unchanged, and consequently a pure
position distinct from the situation of the object in its concrete con¬
text. We know how this distinction is blurred in modem conceptions
of space, even at the level of scientific knowledge. Here we want
to compare it, not with the technical instruments which modern
physics has acquired, but with our experience of space, the ultimate
court of appeal, according to Kant himself, of all knowledge con¬
nected with space. Is it true that we are faced with the alternative
either of perceiving things in space, or (if we reflect and try to dis¬
cover the significance of our own experiences) of conceiving space
as the indivisible system governing the acts of unification performed
by a constituting mind ? Does not the experience of space provide a
basis for its unity by means of an entirely different kind of synthesis ?

Let us consider it before any theoretical elaboration has taken
place. Take, for instance, our experience of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’. We
cannot catch it in the ordinary run of living, because it is then hidden
under its own acquisitions. We must examine some exceptional case
in which it disintegrates and re-forms before our eyes, for example,
in cases of vision without retinal inversion. If a subject is made to
wear glasses which correct the retinal images, the whole landscape at
first appears unreal and upside down; on the second day of the ex¬
periment normal perception begins to reassert itself, except that the
subject has the feeling that his own body is upside down.* 1 In the
course of a second set of experiments2 lasting a week, objects at first
appear inverted, but less unreal than the first time. On the second
day the landscape is no longer inverted, but the body is felt to
be in an abnormal position. From the third to the seventh day,
the body progressively rights itself, and finally seems to occupy a

normal position, particularly when the subject is active. Whea-he -ts-

lying motionless on a couch, the body still presents itself against the

1 Stratton, Some preliminary experiments on vision without inversion of the
retinal image.

* Stratton, Vision without inversion of the retinal image .

244

SPACE

background of the former space, and, as far as the unseen parts of
the body are concerned, right and left preserve their former localiza¬
tion to the end of the experiment. External objects increasingly have
a look of ‘reality’. From the fifth day, actions which were at first
liable to be misled by the new mode of vision and had to be cor¬
rected in the light of the general visual upheaval, now go infallibly
to their objective. The new visual appearance which, at the beginning,
stood out against a background of previous space, develop round
themselves, at first (third day) only through a great effort of will, later
(seventh day) with no effort at all, a horizon with a general orienta¬
tion corresponding to their own. On the seventh day, the placing of
sounds is correct so long as the sounding object is seen as well as
heard. It remains unreliable, and with a double, or even inaccurate,
representation, if the source of the sound does not appear in the
visual field. At the end of the experiment, when the glasses are re¬
moved, objects appear not inverted, it is true, but ‘queer’, and
motor reactions are reversed: the subject reaches out his right hand
when it should be his left. The psychologist is at first tempted to say1
that after the glasses have been put on, the visual world is given to the
subject exactly as if it had been turned through 180°, and conse¬
quently is upside down for him. As the illustrations in a book appear
upside down to us if someone has played the trick of placing it ‘top
to bottom’ while we were looking away, the mass of sensations which
make up the panorama has been turned round, and similarly placed
‘top to bottom’. That other mass of sensations which is the world of
touch has meanwhile stayed ‘the right way’ ; it can no longer coincide
with the visual world so that the subject has two irreconcilable
representations of his body, one given to him by his tactile sensa¬
tions and by those ‘visual images’ which he has managed to retain
from the period preceding the experiment; the other, that of his
present vision which shows him his body ‘head downwards’. This
conflict of images can end only if one of the two contestants with¬
draws. Finding out how a normal situation is restored amounts then
to finding out how the new image of the world and one’s own
body can cause the other to ‘pale’,2 or ‘displace’ it.3 It is notice¬
able that the normal situation is the more successfully achieved in
proportion as the subject is more active; for example, as early as the
second day when he washes his hands.4 It would appear then that it
is the experience of movement guided by sight which teaches the
subject to harmonize the visual and tactile data: he becomes aware,

1 This is, at least implicitly, Stratton’s interpretation.

2 Stratton, Vision without inversion, p. 350.

8 Some preliminary experiments , p. 617.

4 Vision without inversion, p. 346.

245

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

for instance, that the movement needed to reach his legs, hitherto
a movement ‘downwards’, makes its appearance in the new visual
spectacle as one which was previously ‘upwards’. Observations of
this kind enable inappropriate gestures to be corrected in the early
stages by taking visual data as simply signs to be decoded and by
translating them into the language of the former space. Once they
have become ‘habitual’,* 1 they set up between the old and the new
directions, stable ‘associations’2 3 which do away with the former in
favour of the latter, these being dominant by reason of their visual
origin. The ‘top’ of the visual field, where the legs at first appear,
having been frequently identified with what is ‘down’ for the touch,
soon the subject has no further need of the mediation of calculated
movements to pass from one system to the other; his legs settle down
at what he used to call the ‘top’ of the visual field; not only does he
‘see’ them there, he also ‘feels’ them there 8 and eventually ‘what
had previously been “the top” of the visual field begins to give an
impression similar to that which belonged to the “bottom”, and vice
versa \4 * As soon as the tactile body links up with the visual one, that
region of the visual field in which the subject’s feet appeared stops
being described as ‘the top’. This designation is transferred to the
region in which the head appears, and that containing the feet once
more becomes the bottom.

But this interpretation is unintelligible. The inversion of the land¬
scape, followed by the return to normal vision, are explained by
supposing that the top and bottom are turned topsyturvy and made
variable with the apparent direction of head and feet as given in the
image , that they are, so to speak, marked out in the sensory field by
the actual distribution of sensations. But in no case — either at the
beginning of the experiment, when the world is ‘turned upside
down’, or at the end when it ‘rights itself’ — can the orientation
of the field be given by these contents of head and feet which
appear in it. For these contents would themselves have to have a
direction, in order to pass it on to the field. ‘Inverted’ or ‘upright’, in
themselves, obviously have no meaning. The reply will run: after
putting on the glasses the visual field appears inverted in relation
to the tactile and bodily field, or the ordinary visual field, which, by
nominal definition, we say are ‘upright’. But the same question arises
concerning these fields which we take as standard: their mere pres¬
ence is not enough to provide any direction whatsoever. Among

things, two points are enough to establish a direction. But we are not

1 Stratton, The Spatial Harmony of Touch and Sight , pp. 492-505.

2 Ibid.

3 Stratton, Some preliminary experiments , p. 614.

4 Stratton, Vision without inversion, p. 350.

246

SPACE

among things, we have as yet only sensory fields which are not collec¬
tions of sensations placed before us, sometimes ‘head to the top’,
sometimes ‘head downwards’, but systems of appearances varyingly
orientated during the course of the experiment, even where no change
occurs in the grouping of stimuli So it is precisely a matter of finding
out what happens when these floating appearances are suddenly
anchored and take up a position in relation to ‘up’ and ‘down’,
whether at the beginning of the experiment, when the tactile and
bodily field seems ‘upright’ and the visual field ‘inverted’, or sub¬
sequently when the first turns upside down while the second rights
itself, or finally at the conclusion of the experiment when both are
more or less ‘straight’. One cannot take the world and orientated
space as given along with the contents of sense experience or the
body in itself, since experience in fact shows that the same contents
can be successively orientated in one direction or another, and that
objective relationships as registered on the retina through the posi¬
tion of the physical image do not govern our experience of ‘up’ and
‘down’. What we want to know is how an object can appear to us as
‘the right way up’ or ‘inverted’, and what these words mean.

The question is applicable not only to an empiricist psychology
which treats the perception of space as the reception, within our¬
selves, of a real space, and the phenomenal orientation of objects as
reflecting their orientation in the world. It is equally relevant to in-
tellectualist psychology in which the ‘upright’ and the ‘inverted’ are
relationships dependent upon the fixed points chosen. As the axis of
co-ordinates selected, whatever it may be, is as yet situated in space
only in relation to another guide-post, and so on, so the task of
taking the world’s bearings is indefinitely postponed. ‘Up’ and ‘down’
lose any specific meaning they might have, unless, by an impossible
contradiction, we recognize certain contents as having the power to
take up a position in space, which brings back empiricism and its
difficulties. It is easy to show that there can be a direction only for a
subject who describes it, and a constituting mind is eminently able to
trace out all directions in space, but has at any moment no direction,
and consequently no space, without an actual starting-point, an
absolute ‘here’ which can gradually confer a significance on all
spatial determinations. Intellectualism as well as empiricism re¬
mains anterior to the problem of orientated space, because it cannot
even begin to ask the question. In the case of empiricism, the ques¬
tion was how the image of the world which, in itself, is inverted, can
right itself for me. Intellectualism cannot even concede that the
image of the world, after the glasses are put on, is inverted. For there
is nothing, for a constituting mind, to distinguish the experience
before from the experience after putting on the glasses, or even

247

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

anything to make the visual experience of the ‘inverted’ body incom¬
patible with the tactile experience of the ‘upright’ body, since it does
not view the spectacle from anywhere , and since all the objective re¬
lations between the body and its environment are preserved in the
new spectacle. We can therefore see what the question involves; em¬
piricism would willingly take the actual orientation of my bodily
experience as the fixed point we need if we are to understand that
there are directions for us, — but both experience and reflection
demonstrate that no content is in itself orientated. Intellectualism
starts from this relativity of up and down, but cannot stand outside
it in order to account for an actual perception of space. We cannot
understand, therefore, the experience of space either in terms of the
consideration of contents or of that of some pure unifying activity;
we are confronted with that third spatiality towards which we pointed
a little while ago, which is neither that of things in space, nor that of
spatializing space, and which, on this account, evades the Kantian
analysis and is presupposed by it. We need an absolute within the
sphere of the relative, a space which does not skate over appearances,
which indeed takes root in them and is dependent upon them, yet
which is nevertheless not given along with them in any realist way,
and can, as Stratton’s experiment shows, survive their complete dis¬
organization. We have to look for the first-hand experience of space
on the hither side of the distinction between form and content.

If we' so contrive it that a subject sees the room in which he is, only
through a mirror which reflects it at an angle at 45° to the vertical,
the subject at first sees the room ‘slantwise’. A man walking about in
it seems to lean to one side as he goes. A piece of cardboard falling
down the door-frame looks to be falling obliquely. The general effect
is ‘queer’. After a few minutes a sudden change occurs: the walls,
the man walking about the room, and the line in which the card¬
board falls become vertical.* 1 This experiment, analogous to Stratton’s,
has the advantage of throwing into relief an instantaneous redistri¬
bution of high and low, without any motor exploration. We were
already aware that it is meaningless to say that the oblique (or in¬
verted) image brings with it a repositioning of high and low which we
come to identify by a motor exploration of the new spectacle. But
now we see that this exploration is not even necessary, and that con¬
sequently bearings are taken by a comprehensive act on the part of
the perceiving subject. Let us say that perception before the experi-

ment recognizes a certain spatial level in relation to which the

spectacle provided in the experiment first of all appears oblique, and
that during the experiment this spectacle induces another level in
relation to which the whole of the visual field can once more seem

1 Wertheimer, Experimentelle Studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegung , p. 258.

248

SPACE

straight. It is as if certain objects (walls, doors and the body of the
man in the room), having been seen aslant in relation to a given level,
then take it upon themselves to provide the cardinal directions,
attracting to themselves the vertical, acting as ‘anchoring points’,1
and causing the previously established horizontal to tilt sideways.
We are not falling here into the realistic mistake of using the visual
spectacle as a source of directions in space, since the spectacle ex¬
perimentally provided is turned (obliquely) for us only in relation to
a certain level, and since, therefore, it does not give us by itself the
new up-and-down axis. It remains to be seen what precisely is this
level which is always ahead of itself, since every constitution of a
level presupposes a different, pre-established level — how the ‘anchor¬
ing points’, working from within a certain space from which they
derive their stability, suggest to us the constitution of a fresh one,
what ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ really are, unless they are merely names
applicable to an orientation in itself of the contents of sense experi¬
ence. We hold that the ‘spatial level’ is not confused with the orienta¬
tion of one’s own body. In so far as consciousness of one’s own body
indubitably contributes to the constitution of level (a subject tilting
his head on one side holds a stick obliquely, when he is asked to hold
it vertically)2 it is, in this function, in competition with the other
sectors of experience, and the vertical tends to follow the direction
of the head only if the visual field is empty, and if the ‘anchoring
points’ are lacking, for example when one is working in the dark.
As a mass of tactile, labyrinthine and kinaesthetic data, the body has
no more definite orientation than the other contents of experience,
and it too receives this orientation from the general level of experi¬
ence. Wertheimer’s observation serves to show how the visual
field can impose an orientation which is not that of the body. But
although the body, as a mosaic of given sensations, has no specific
direction, nevertheless, as an agent, it plays an essential part in the
establishment of a leveL Variations in muscular tonicity, even with
a full visual field, so modify the apparent vertical that the subject
leans his head on one side in order to place it parallel to this deflected
vertical.3 One might be tempted to say that the vertical is the direc¬
tion represented by the symmetry axis of our body as a synergic
system. My body can, however, move without drawing along with it
the directions of upward and downward, as when I lie down on the
ground, and Wertheimer’s experiment shows that the objective direc¬
tion of my body can form an appreciable angle with the apparent
vertical of the spectacle. What counts for the orientation of the

1 Wertheimer, Experimentelle Studien iiber das Sehen yon Bewegung , p. 253.

2 Nagel, quoted by Wertheimer, ibid., p. 257.

3 La Structure du Comportement , p. 199.

249

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space,
but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its pheno¬
menal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever
there is something to be done. As soon as Wertheimer’s subject
takes his place in the experimental situation prepared for him, the
area of his possible actions — such as walking, opening a cupboard,
using a table, sitting down — outlines in front of him, even if he has
his eyes shut, a possible habitat. At first the mirror image presents
him with a room differently canted, which means that the subject is
not at home with the utensils it contains, he does not inhabit it, and
does not share it with the man he sees walking to and fro. After a
few minutes, provided that he does not strengthen his initial an¬
chorage by glancing away from the mirror, the reflected room
miraculously calls up a subject capable of living in it. This virtual
body ousts the real one to such an extent that the subject no longer
has the feeling of being in the world where he actually is, and that
instead of his real legs and arms, he feels that he has the legs and arms
he would need to walk and act in the reflected room; he inhabits the
spectacle. It is then that the spatial level tilts and takes up its new
position. It is, then, a certain possession of the world by my body, a
certain gearing of my body to the world. Being projected, in the
absence of anchoring points, by the attitude of my body alone, as in
Nagel’s experiments — specified, when the body is inert, through the
demands of the spectacle alone, as in Wertheimer’s experiment — it
normally makes its appearance where my motor intentions and my
perceptual field join forces, when my actual body is at one with the
■virtual body required by the spectacle, and the actual spectacle
with the setting which my body throws round it. It comes to rest
when, between my body as the potentiality for certain movements,
as the demand for certain preferential planes, and the spectacle per¬
ceived as an invitation to the same movements and the scene of the
same actions, a pact is concluded which gives me the enjoyment of
space and gives to things their direct power over my body. The con¬
stitution of a spatial level is simply one means of constituting an
integrated world: my body is geared to the world when my percep¬
tion presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated
as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive
the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness
of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis
of mv life, a general setting in which my body can cn-exisi with the.

world. With the notion of a spatial level, and of the body as the
subject of space, we begin to understand the phenomena described
by Stratton but left unexplained by him. If the ‘correction’ of the
field were the outcome of a set of associations between the new

250

SPACE

positions and the old, how could the operation convey the general
effect of being systematic, and how could whole sections of the per¬
ceptual horizon suddenly fall into line with already ‘corrected’ ob¬
jects? If, on the other hand, the new orientation sprang from a pro¬
cess of thought, and consisted of a change of co-ordinates, how could
the auditory or tactile field resist transposition? The constituting
subject would, per impossibile , have to be cut off from himself and
able to overlook in one place what he was doing in another.1 In
so far as the transposition is systematic, and yet piece-meal and pro¬
gressive, it is because I go from one system of positions to the other
without having the key to each, and in the way that a man sings, in
another key, a tune he has heard, though he has no knowledge of
music. The possession of a body implies the ability to change levels
and to ‘understand’ space, just as the possession of a voice implies
the ability to change key. The perceptual field corrects itself and at
the conclusion of the experiment I identify it without any concept
because I live in it, because I am borne wholly into the new spectacle
and, so to speak, transfer my centre of gravity into it.2 * * S At the be¬
ginning of the experiment, the visual field appears both inverted and
unreal because the subject does not live in it and is not geared to it.
In the course of the experiment, we notice an intermediate phase in
which the tactile body seems to be inverted and the landscape up¬
right because, since I already live in the landscape, I see it accord¬
ingly as upright, the disturbance brought about by the experiment
being concentrated in my own body, which thus becomes, not a mass
of affective sensations, but the body which is needed to perceive a
given spectacle. Everything throws us back on to the organic rela¬
tions between subject and space, to that gearing of the subject to his
world which is the origin of space.

But one may wish to go further^iiito the analysis. Why, it may be
asked, are clear perception and assured action possible only in a
phenomenal space which is orientated? This is obvious only if we
suppose the subject of perception and action faced with a world

1 Change of direction in acoustic phenomena is extremely difficult to bring
about. If we arrange, with the aid of a pseudophone, for sounds coming from the
left to reach the right ear before they strike the left, we get an inversion of the
auditory field comparable to the inversion of the visual field in Stratton’s experi¬
ment. Now even with long; practice people do not manage to ‘correct’ the auditory
field. The placing of souiids by hearing alone remains incorrect to the end. It is
correct, and the sound seems to come from the object on the left only if the object
is seen at the same time as it is heard. P. T. Young, Auditory localization with
acoustical transposition of the ears,

2 The subject can, in experiments on auditory inversion, produce the illusion of

correct localization when he sees the source of sound, because he inhibits his

auditory phenomena and ‘lives’ in the visual. P. T. Young, ibid.

S 251

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

where there are already absolute directions, so that he has to adjust
the dimensions of his behaviour to those of the world. But we are
now placing ourselves inside perception, and we are puzzled to know
precisely how it can come by absolute directions, and so we cannot
suppose them to be given at the source of our spatial experience. The
objection amounts to saying what we have been saying from the
start ; that the constitution of a level always presupposes another given
level, that space always precedes itself. But this remark is not a
mere admission of defeat. It enlightens us concerning the essence of
space and the only method which enables us to understand it. It is of
the essence of space to be always ‘already constituted’, and we shall
never come to understand it by withdrawing into a worldless per¬
ception, Wc must not wonder why being is orientated, why existence
is spatial, why, using the expression we used a little while ago, our
body is not geared to the world in all its positions, and why its co¬
existence with the world magnetizes experience and induces a direc¬
tion in it. The question could be asked only if the facts were fortuitous
happenings to a subject and an object indifferent to space, whereas
perceptual experience shows that they are presupposed in our
primordial encounter with being, and that being is synonymous with
being situated. For the thinking subject a face seen ‘tile right way up’
and the same face seen ‘upside down’ are indistinguishable. For the
, subject of perception the face seen ‘upside down’ is unrecognizable.
If someone is lying on a bed, and I look at him from the head of the
bed, the face is for a moment normal. It is true that the features are in
a way disarranged, and I have some difficulty in realizing that the
smile is a smile, but I feel that I could, if I wanted, walk round the
bed, and I seem to see through the eyes of a spectator standi ng at the
foot of the bed. If the spectacle is protracted, it suddenly changes its
appearance: the face takes on an utterly unnatural aspect, its ex¬
pressions become terrifying, and the eyelashes and eyebrows assume
an air of materiality such as I have never seen in them. For the first
time I really see the inverted face as if this were its ‘natural’ position:
in front of me 1 have a pointed, hairless head with a red, teeth-filled
orifice in the forehead and, where the mouth ought to be, two moving
orbs edged with glistening hairs and underlined with stiff brushes.
It will probably be said that the face seen the ‘right way up’ is, among
all the possible aspects of a face, the one which is most frequently
given to me, and that the inverted face startles me because I see it
only rarely. But faces are not often presented in a strictly vertical
position, the 'upright7 face enjoys no statistical preponderance, and
the question is why, this being the case, it is given to me more often
than any other. If it be conceded that my perception makes it a
standard and refers to it as to a norm for reasons of symmetry, the

252

SPACE

question arises why, beyond a certain angle, the ‘correction’ does not
operate. We must conclude that my gaze which moves over the face,
and in doing so favours certain directions, does not recognize the
face unless it comes up against its details in a certain irreversible
order, and that the very significance of the object — here the face and
its expressions — must be linked to its orientation, as indeed is in¬
dicated by the double usage of the French word sens * To invert an
object is to deprive it of its significance. Its being as an object is,
therefore, not a being-for-the-thinking subject, but a being-for-the-
gaze which meets it at a certain angle, and otherwise fails to recog¬
nize it. This is why each object has its ‘top* and its ‘bottom’ which
indicate, for a given level, its ‘natural’ position, the one which it
‘should’ occupy. To see a face is not to conceive the idea of a certain
law of constitution to which the object invariably conforms through¬
out all its possible orientations, it is to take a certain hold upon it,
to be able to follow on its surface a certain perceptual route with its
ups and downs, and one just as unrecognizable taken in reverse as
the mountain up which I was so recently toiling, and down which
I am now striding my way. Generally speaking, our perception would
not comprise either outlines, figures, backgrounds or objects, and
would consequently not be perception of anything, or indeed exist at
all, if the subject of perception were not this gaze which takes a grip
upon things only in so far as they have a general direction; and this
general direction in space is not a contingent characteristic of the
object, it is the means whereby I recognize it and am conscious of it
as of an object. It is true that I can be conscious of the same object
variously orientated, and, as we have said, I can even recognize an
inverted face. But it is always provided that mentally we take up
position in front of it, and sometimes we even do so physically, as
when we tilt our head to look at a photograph held in front of him
by a person at our side. Thus, since every conceivable being is related
either directly or indirectly to the perceived world, and since the per¬
ceived world is grasped only in tferms of direction, we cannot dis¬
sociate being from orientated being, and there is no occasion to ‘find
a basis for’ space or to ask what is the level of all levels. The primor¬
dial level is on the horizon of all our perceptions, but it is a horizon
which cannot in principle ever be reached and thematized in our
express perception. Each of the levels in which we successively live
makes its appearance when we cast anchor in some ‘setting’ which
is offered to us. This setting itself is spatially particularized only for a
previously given level. Thus each of the whole succession of our ex¬
periences, including the first, passes on an already acquired spatiality.
The condition of our first perception’s being spatial is that it should
* ‘sense, significance, direction’ (Translator’s note).

253

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

have referred to some orientation which preceded it. It must, then
have found us already at work in a world. Yet this cannot be a
certain world, a certain spectacle, since we have put ourselves at the
origin of all of them. The first spatial level cannot find its anchorage
anywhere, since this anchorage would need a level anterior to the
first level in order to be particularized in space. And since it cannot be
orientated ‘in itself’, my first perception and my first hold upon the
world must appear to me as action in accordance with an earlier
agreement reached between x and the world in general, my history
must be the continuation of a prehistory and must utilize the latter’s
acquired results. My personal existence must be the resumption of a
prcpcrsonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath
me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out
my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that
momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and
which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous
functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project
Nor does this blind adherence to the world, this prejudice in favour
of being, occur only at the beginning of my life. It endows every sub-
sequent perception of space with its meaning, and it is resumed at
every instant. Space and perception generally represent, at the core
of the subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his
bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than
thought. That is why they saturate consciousness and are impene¬
trable to reflection. The instability of levels produces not only the
intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of
giddiness and nausea,1 which is the awareness of our contingency
and the horror with which it fills us. The positing of a level means
losing sight of this contingency; space has its basis in our faclicity.
It is neither an object, nor an act of unification on the subject’s part ■
it can neither be observed, since it is presupposed in every observa¬
tion, nor seen to emerge from a constituting operation, since it is of
its essence that it be already constituted, for thus it can, by its magic
confer its own spatial particularizations upon the landscape without
ever appearing itself.

Traditional ideas of perception arc at one in denying that depth is
visible* Berkeley shows that it could not be given io sight in the
absence of any means of recording it, since our retinas receive only
■ ewment. Wcrlhcimer

* i. . . . . _ , ; me cA|x;iiii]cn[, weruieimer

talks about a visual vertigo {Experm, euteife Studieti, pp. 257-91. We remain
physically upright not through the mechanism of the skeleton or even through ihe
nervous regulation of muscular tone, but because we are caught up in a world

moJe an 0°SCnl “ wcakencd’ the collapses and becomes once

254

SPACE

a manifestly flat projection of the spectacle. If one retorted that after
the criticism of the ‘constancy hypothesis’ we cannot judge what we
see by what is pictured on our retinas, Berkeley would probably
reply that, whatever may be true of the retinal image, depth cannot
be seen because it is not spread out before our eyes, but appears to
them only in foreshortened form. In analytical reflection, it is for
theoretical reasons that depth is to be judged invisible: even if it
could be registered by our eyes, the sensory impression would present
only a multiplicity in itself, which would have to be ranged over, so
that distance, like all other spatial relations, exists only for a subject
who synthesizes it and embraces it in thought. Though diametrically
opposed to each other, the two doctrines presuppose the same re¬
pression of our affective experience. In both cases depth is tacitly
equated With breadth seen from the side , and this is what makes it
invisible. Berkeley’s argument, made quite explicit, runs roughly like
this. What I call depth is in reality a juxtaposition of points, making
it comparable to breadth. I am simply badly placed to see it. I should
see it if I were in the position of a spectator looking on from the side,
who can take in at a glance the series of objects spread out in front
of me, whereas for me they conceal each other — or see the distance
from my body to the first object, whereas for me this distance is
compressed into a point. What makes depth invisible for me is
precisely what makes it visible for the spectator as breadth : the juxta¬
position of simultaneous points in one direction which is that of my
gaze. The depth which is declared invisible, is, therefore, a depth
already identified with breadth and, this being the case, the argu¬
ment would lack even a semblance of consistency. In the same way,
intellectualism can bring to light, in the experience of depth, a think¬
ing subject who synthesizes that experience, only because it reflects
on the basis of a depth already in existence, on a juxtaposition of
simultaneous points which is not depth as it is presented to me, but
as it is presented to a spectator standing at the side, in short as
breadth.1 By assimilating one to the other from the very outset, the
two philosophies take for granted the result of a constitutive process
the stages of which we must, in fact, trace back. In order to treat
depth as breadth viewed in profile, in order to arrive at a uniform
space, the subject must leave his place, abandon his point of view on
the world, and think himself into a sort of ubiquity. For God, who
is everywhere, breadth is immediately equivalent to depth. Intellec¬
tualism and empiricism do not give us any account of the human ex¬
perience of the world; they tell us what God might think about it.

1 The distinction between the depth of things in relation to me, and the distance
between two objects, is made by Paliard, V Illusion de Sinnsteden et le probUme de
V implication perceptive , p. 400, and by E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, pp. 267-9.

255

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

And indeed it is the world itself which suggests to us that we sub¬
stitute one dimension for another and conceive it from no point of
view. All men accept without any speculation the equivalence of
depth and breadth; this equivalence is part and parcel of the self-
evidence of an intersubjective world, which is what makes philo¬
sophers as forgetful as anyone else of the originality of depth. But
prior to this we know nothing of the world and of space as objective,
we are trying to describe the phenomenon of the world, that is, its
birth for us in that field into which each perception sets us back,
where we are as yet still alone, where other people will appear only at a
later stage, in which knowledge and particularly science have not so
far ironed out and levelled down the individual perspective. It is
through this birth that we are destined to graduate to a world, and
we must therefore describe it. More directly than the other dimen¬
sions of space, depth forces us to reject the preconceived notion of
the world and rediscover the primordial experience from which it
springs: it is, so to speak, the most ‘existential’ of all dimensions,
because (and here Berkeley’s argument is right) it is not impressed
upon the object itself, it quite clearly belongs to the perspective and
not to things. Therefore it cannot either be extracted from, or even put
into that perspective by consciousness. It announces a certain in¬
dissoluble link between things and myself by which I am placed in
front of them, whereas breadth can, at first sight, be taken as a re¬
lationship between things themselves, in which the perceiving sub¬
ject is not implied. By rediscovering the vision of depth, that is to
say, of a depth which is not yet objectified and made up of mutually
external points, we shall once more outrun the traditional alterna¬
tives and elucidate the relation between subject and object.

Here is my table, farther away is the piano or the wall, or again a
car which is standing in front of me is started and drives away . What
do these words mean? In order to resuscitate the perceptual experi¬
ence, let us take as our starting point the superficial account given by a
thought obsessed by the world and the object. These words, it is
maintained, mean that between the table and myself there is an in¬
terval, between the car and myself an increasing interval that I cannot
see from where I am, but which reveals itself to me by the apparent
size of the object. It is the apparent size of the table, the piano and
the wall which, relative to their real size, assigns to them their place
in space. When the car slowly climbs up towards the horizon, all thn
while decreasing in size, I account for this appearance by construct¬
ing a displacement in terms of breadth such as I should perceive if I
were observing the scene from an aeroplane, and which, in the last
analysis, is the whole meaning of depth. But I have also other signs of
distance to go on. As an object approaches me, my eyes, as long as they

256

SPACE

are focused on it, converge. The distance is the height of a triangle
with its base and base angles given to me1 and, when I say that I am
seeing something at a distance, I mean that the height of the triangle
is determined by its relations to these given sizes. The experience of
depth, according to traditional views, consists in interpreting certain
given facts — the convergence of the eyes, the apparent size of the
image, for example — by placing them in the context of objective rela¬
tions which explain them. But my ability to go back from the apparent
size to its significance is conditioned by my knowledge that there
is a world of undistortable objects, that my body is standing in front
of this world like a mirror and that, like the image in the mirror, the
one which is formed on the body screen is exactly proportionate to the
interval which separates it from the object. My ability to understand
convergence as a sign of distance is conditioned by my visualizing my
gaze as the blind man’s two sticks, which run more sharply together
in proportion as the object is brought nearer;2 in other words, by my
inclusion of my eyes, body and the external world into one and the
same objective space. The ‘signs’ which, ex hypothesis ought to
acquaint us with the experience of space can, therefore, convey the
idea of space only if they are already involved in it, and if it is already
known. Since perception is initiation into the world, and since, as
has been said with insight, ‘there is nothing anterior to it which is
mind’,3 we cannot put into it objective relationships which are not
yet constituted at its level. That is why the Cartesians spoke of a
‘natural geometry’. The significance of apparent size and convergence,
that is distance, cannot yet be set forth and thematized. Apparent size
and convergence themselves cannot be given as elements in a system
of objective relationships. ‘Natural geometry’ or ‘natural judgement’
are myths in the Platonic sense, intended to represent the envelop¬
ment or ‘implication’ of a significance in signs, neither signs nor
significance being yet posited and explicitly contained in thought,
and this is what we must elucidate by returning to perceptual ex¬
perience. We must describe apparent size and convergence, not as
scientific knowledge sees them, but as we grasp them from within.
Gestalt pyschologists 4 * have observed that they are not explicitly
known in perception itself — I am not expressly aware of the conver¬
gence of my eyes or of apparent size when I perceive at a distance,
they do not confront me as perceived facts do — and that they never¬
theless enter into the perception of distance, as the stereoscope

1 Malebratiche, Recherche de la v4ritS> Book I, Chap. IX. 8 Ibid.

s Paliard, V Illusion de Sinnsteden et le problime de Vimplication perceptive ,

p. 383.

4 Koffka, Some problems of space perception. Guillaume, Traiti de Psychologies

Chap. IX.

257

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

and illusions of perspective amply prove. Psychologists conclude
from this that they are not signs, but conditions or causes of depth.
We observe that organization in depth appears when a certain size
of retinal image or a certain degree of convergence is objectively
produced in the body; this is a law comparable to the laws of physics,
and it has only to be recorded without more ado. But here the
psychologist is evading his task: when he recognizes that apparent
size and convergence are not present in perception itself as objective
facts, he is requiring us to return to the pure description of pheno¬
mena prior to the objective world, and giving us a glimpse of ‘lived’
depth, independently of any kind of geometry. And then he inter¬
rupts the description in order to put himself back in the world and
derive organization in depth from a chain of observed facts. Can one
thus limit description and, once having recognized the phenomenal
order as an original order, re-assign the production of phenomenal
depth to some cerebral alchemy only the result of which is recorded
by experience ? We must choose between the behaviourist course of
refusing all meaning to the word ‘experience’, and trying to build up
perception as a product of the world and of science, or else we must
concede that experience too gives us access to being, in which case
it cannot be treated as a by-product of being. Either experience is
nothing or it must be total.

Let us try to envisage what an organization in depth produced by
cerebral physiology might be. For any given apparent size and con¬
vergence, there would appear somewhere in the brain a functional
structure homologous with the organization in depth. But this is in
any case only a given depth, a factual depth, and we still have to
become aware of it. To experience a structure is not to receive it into
oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover
its immanent significance. Thus an experience can never bear the
relation to certain factual conditions that it would bear to its cause1
and, even if consciousness of distance is produced for a certain value
of convergence and a certain size of retinal image, it can depend on
these factors only in so far as they figure in it. Since we have no
express experience of it, we must conclude that we have a non-
thetic* experience of it. Convergence and apparent size are neither
signs nor causes of depth: they are present in the experience of depth
in the way that a motive , even when it is not articulate and separately
posited, is present in a decision. What do we understand by a motive,

1 In other words: an act of consciousness can have no cause. But we prefer not
to introduce the concept of consciousness which Gestalt psychology might chal¬
lenge, and which we for our part do not unreservedly accept. We shall stick to the
unexceptionable notion of experience.

* I.e. not explicitly posited (Translator’s note).

258

SPACE

and what do we mean when we say, for example, that a journey is
motivated? We mean thereby that it has its origin in certain given
facts, not in so far as these facts by themselves have the physical
power to bring it about, but in that they provide reasons for under¬
taking it. The motive is an antecedent which acts only through its
significance, and it must be added that it is the decision which
affirms the validity of this significance and gives it its force and
efficacy. Motive and decision are two elements of a situation: the
former is the situation as a fact, the second the situation undertaken.
Thus a death motivates my journey because it is a situation in which
my presence is required, whether to console a bereaved family or to
‘pay one’s last respects’ to the deceased, and, by deciding to make the
journey, I validate this motive which puts itself forward, and I take
up the situation. The relation between motivating factor and moti¬
vated act is thus reciprocal. Now a similar relationship exists between
the experience of convergence, or of apparent size, and that of depth.
They do not act miraculously as ‘causes’ in producing the appearance
of organization in depth, they tacitly motivate it in so far as they
already contain it in their significance, and in so far as they are both
already a certain way of looking at a distance. We have already seen
that the convergence of the eyes is not the cause of depth, and that
it itself presupposes an orientation towards the object placed at a
distance. Let us now concentrate on the notion of apparent size. If
we look for a long time at an illuminated object which will leave
behind it a following image, and if we focus subsequently on screens
placed at varying distances, the after-image is thrown upon them
with a diameter greater in proportion as the screen is farther away.1
The enlarged moon on the horizon has long been explained by the
large number of objects interposed which emphasize the distance and
consequently increase the apparent diameter. It follows that the
phenomenon of ‘apparent size’ and the phenomenon of distance are
two phases * of a comprehensive organization of the field, that the
first stands to the second neither in the relation of sign to meaning,
nor in that of cause to effect, but that, like the motivating factor to
the motivated act, they communicate through their significance.
Apparent size as experienced, instead of being the sign or indication
of a depth invisible in itself, is nothing other than a way of expressing
our vision of depth. Gestalt psychology has indeed contributed to
showing that the apparent size of a retreating object does not vary
proportionately to the retinal image, and that the apparent shape of
a disc turning round one of its diameters does not vary as one would

1 Quercy, Etudes sur V hallucination, II, La clinique , pp. 154 and ff.

* ‘moments’ (Translator’s note).

259

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

expect according to the geometrical perspective. The object moving
away grows smaller, and the object approaching grows larger, less
quickly for my perception than the physical image on my retina.
That is why the train coming towards us, at the cinema, increases in
size much more than it would in reality. It is also why a hill which
seemed high becomes insignificant in a photograph. And finally it is
why a disc placed obliquely to our face resists geometrical perspec¬
tive, as Cezanne and other painters have shown by depicting a
soup plate seen from the side with the inside still visible. It has been
rightly said that, if perspective distortions were expressly given to
us, we should not have to learn perspective. But Gestalt psychologists
talk as if the distortion of the oblique plate were a compromise
between the shape of the plate seen from above and the geometrical
perspective, and as if the apparent size of the retreating object were
a compromise between its apparent size when within reach and the
much smaller one which geometrical perspective would attribute to
it. They talk, in fact, as if constancy of shape or size were a real con¬
stancy, as if there were, besides the physical image of the object on
the retina, a ‘mental image’ of the same object which remained rela¬
tively constant while the first varied. In reality, the ‘mental image* of
this ash-tray is neither larger nor smaller than the physical image of
the same object on my retina: there is no mental image that can be
compared, as if it were a thing, with the physical image, no mental
image which has a determinate size relative to the physical and which
stands like a screen between me and the thing. My perception does
not bear upon a content of consciousness : it bears upon the ash-tray
itself. The apparent size of the perceived ash-tray is not a measurable
size. When I am asked what diameter I see it as having, I cannot
reply to the question as long as T keep both eyes open. Spontane¬
ously, I shut one eye, I take a measuring instrument, a pencil held at
arm’s length, for example, and I mark on the pencil the size
reached by the ash-tray. In doing this, I must avoid merely saying
that I have reduced the perceived perspective to the geometrical, that
I have altered the proportions of the spectacle, and that I have con¬
tracted the object if it is at a distance or that 1 have expanded it if it is
near at hand — I must rather say that by breaking up the perceptual
field and isolating the ash-tray, by positing it for itself, I have caused
size to appear where hitherto it had no place. The constancy of
apparent size in a retreating object is not the actual permanence of
some mental image of the object capable of resisting the distortions
of perspective as a firm object resists pressure. The constancy of
circular shape in a plate is not the resistance of the circle to the
flattening of perspective, and this is why the painter who can repre¬
sent it only by a real outline on a real canvas surprises the viewer,

260

SPACE

although he is trying to render perspective as experienced. When I
look at a road which sweeps before me towards the horizon, I must
not say either that the sides of the road are given to me as convergent
or that they are given to me as parallel: they are parallel in depth .
The perspective appearance is not posited, but neither is the parallel¬
ism. I am engrossed in the road itself \ and I cling to it through its
virtual distortion, and depth is this intention itself which posits
neither the perspective projection of the road, nor the ‘real’ road.
And yet is not a man smaller at two hundred yards than at five yards
away? He becomes so if I isolate him from the perceived context and
measure his apparent size. Otherwise he is neither smaller nor indeed
equal in size: he is anterior to equality and inequality; he is the same
man seen from farther away. One can only say that the man two
hundred yards away is a much less distinguishable figure, that he
presents fewer and less identifiable points on which my eyes can
fasten, that he is less strictly geared to my powers of exploration.
Again one can say that he less completely occupies my visual field,
provided that one remembers that the visual field itself is not a
measurable area. To say that an object takes up only a small part of
my visual field is to say in effect that it does not offer a sufficiently
rich configuration to absorb completely my power of clear vision.
My visual field has no definite capacity, and it can contain more or
fewer things according as I see ‘at a distance* or ‘near*. Apparent
size is, therefore, not definable independently of distance; it is im¬
plied by distance and it also implies distance. Convergence, apparent
size and distance are read off from each other, naturally symbolize
or signify each other, are the abstract elements of a situation and are,
within it, mutually synonymous, not because the subject of percep¬
tion posits objective relations between them, but on the contrary
because he does not posit them separately and therefore has no
need to unify them expressly. Taking the various ‘apparent sizes’ of
the retreating object, it is not necessary to link them in a synthesis if
none of them has been specifically posited. We ‘have’ the retreating
object, we never cease to ‘hold’ it and to have a grip on it, and the
increasing distance is not, as breadth appears to be, an augmenting
externality: it expresses merely that the thing is beginning to slip
away from the grip of our gaze and is less closely allied to it. Distance
is what distinguishes this loose and approximate grip from the com¬
plete grip which is proximity. We shall define it then as we defined
‘straight’ and ‘oblique’ above : in terms of the situation of the object
in relation to our power of grasping it.

It is principally illusions relating to depth which have made us
accustomed to considering it as a construction of the understanding.
We can produce them by imposing upon the eyes a certain degree of

261

THF. WORLD AS PERCEIVED

convergence, as at the stereoscope, or by setting before the subject
a perspective drawing. Since in this case I imagine that I see depth
when there is none, is this not because misleading signs have given
rise to a hypothesis, and because generally the alleged vision of dis¬
tance is always an interpretation of signs? But the postulate is clear;
we suppose that it is not possible to see what is not there, we there¬
fore define vision in terms, of sensory impression, missing the original
relationship of motivation and replacing it by one of significance.
We have seen that the disparity between the retinal images, which
stimulates convergence, does not exist in itself; there is disparity
only for a subject who tries to fuse monocular phenomena similar in
structure and who tends towards synergy. The unity of binocular
vision, and with it the depth without which it cannot come about is,
therefore, there from the very moment at which the monocular
images are presented as ‘disparate’. When I look in the stereoscope,
a totality presents itself in which already the possible order takes
shape and the situation is foreshadowed. My motor response takes
up this situation. GSzanne said that the painter in the face of his
‘motif’ is about ‘to join the aimless hands of nature’.1 The act of
focusing at the stereoscope is equally a response to the question put

U. , Ant o n-nA wenonen io r*r\n t q i in flip nnpctinn Tt io

uy tills Utmi) (U.1U 1'ILLi* iwj/uimw

field itself which is moving towards the most perfect possible sym¬
metry, and depth is merely a stage * in arriving at a perceptual faith
in one single thing. The perspective drawing is not first of all
perceived as a drawing on a plane surface, and then organized in
depth. The lines which sweep towards the horizon are not first given
as oblique, and then thought of as horizontal. The whole of the
drawing strives towards its equilibrium by delving in depth. The
poplar on the road which is drawn smaller than a man, succeeds in
becoming really and truly a tree only by retreating towards the
horizon. It is the drawing itself which tends towards depth as a stone
falls downwards. If symmetry, plenitude and determinacy can be
achieved in several ways, the organization will not be stable, as can
be seen in ambiguous drawings.

Thus Fig. 1 below can be seen either as a cube seen from below
with the face ABCD in the foreground, or as a cube seen from above
with the face EFGH in the foreground, or as a mosaic pattern of ten
triangles and a square. Fig. 2 on the other hand will almost inevitably
be seen as a cube, because that is the only organization which gives it
perfect symmetry.2 Depth is born beneath my gaze because the latter
tries to see something . But what is this perceptual genius at work in

1 J. Gasquet, Cezanne , p. 81.

8 Koffka, Some problems of space perception , pp. 164 and ff.
* ‘moment1 (Translator’s note).

SPACE

our visual field, tending always towards the most determinate form?
Are we not now going back to realism? Let us take an example.
Organization in depth is destroyed if I add to the ambiguous drawing
not simply any lines (Fig. 3 stubbornly remains a cube) but lines
which disunite the elements of one and the same plane and join up
those of different planes (Fig. I).1 What do we mean when we say
that these lines themselves bring about the destruction of depth? Are
we not talking the language of associationism? We do not mean that
the line EH (Fig. 1), acting as a cause, disorganizes the cube into
which it is introduced, but that it induces a general grasp which is not
the grasp in depth. It is understood that the line EH itself possesses

Fig. 2

- - '

Fig. 3

an individuality only if I grasp it in that light, if I run over it and trace
it out myself. But this grasp and this delineation are not arbitrary.
They are indicated or recommended by phenomena. The demand here
is not an overriding one, simply because it is a question of an am¬
biguous figure, but, in a normal visual field, the segregation of planes
and outlines is irresistible; for example, when I walk along an avenue,
I cannot bring myself to see the spaces between the trees as things and
the trees themselves as a background. It is certainly I who have the
experience of the landscape, but in this experience I am conscious of
taking up a factual situation, of bringing together a significance dis¬
persed among phenomena, and of saying what they of their own ac¬
cord mean. Even in cases where the organization is ambiguous and
where I can vary it, I do not directly succeed in doing so: one of the
faces of the cube moves into the foreground only if I first look at it
and if my gaze makes it its starting point from which to follow the
oblique lines to the second face, which shows up as an indeterminate
background. If I see Fig. 1 as a mosaic pattern, it is on condition that
I first of all concentrate my gaze on the centre, and then distribute it
equally and simultaneously over the whole figure. As Bergson waits
for the lump of sugar to dissolve, I sometimes have to wait for the

1 Koffka, Some problems of space perception, pp. 164 and ff.

263

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

organization to come about. All the more is it the case that in normal
perception the significance of what is perceived appears to me as
built into it and not constituted by me, and the gaze as a sort of
knowledge machine, which takes things as they need to be taken in
order to become a spectacle, or which divides them up in accordance
with their natural articulations. It is true that the straight line EH
counts as straight only if I run my eye along it, but it is not a matter
of a mental inspection, but of an inspection by the gaze, which means
that my act is not primary or constituting, but called forth or
motivated. Every focus is always a focus on something which pre¬
sents itself as to be focused upon. When I focus upon the face ABCD
of the cube, that does not only mean that I bring it to the state of
being clearly visible, but also that I make it count as a figure and as
nearer to me than the other face; in a word I organize the cube, and
the gaze is that perceptual genius underlying the thinking subject
which can give to things the precise reply that they are awaiting in
order to exist before us.

What, then, to sum up, is seeing a cube? It is, say empiricists, as¬
sociating, with the actual aspect of the drawing presented, a set of
other appearances, those which it would present at closer quarters,
from the side, from various angles. But, when I see a cube, I do not
find any of these images in myself; they are the small change of a
perception of depth which makes them possible, but which does not
result from them. What, then, is this single act whereby I grasp the
possibility of all these appearances? It is, according to intellectual-
ism, the thought of the cube as a solid made up of six equal faces and
twelve equal lines at right angles to each other — and depth is nothing
but the co-existence of the faces and the equal lines. But here again
we are being given as a definition of depth what is no more than a
consequence of it. The six faces and twelve equal lines are not the
whole significance of depth, and yet this definition has no meaning
without depth. The six faces and twelve lines can both co-exist and
remain equal for me only if they are arranged in depth. The act
which corrects the appearances, giving to the acute or obtuse angles
the value of right angles, to the distorted sides the value of a square,
is not the idea of the geometrical relations of equality, and the geo¬
metrical mode of being to which they belong — it is the investing of
the object by my gaze which penetrates and animates it, and shows up
immediately the lateral faces as ‘squares seen askew’, to the extent
that we do not even see them in their diamond-shaped, perspective
aspect. This being simultaneously present in experiences which are
nevertheless mutually exclusive, this implication of one in the other,
this contraction into one perceptual act of a whole possible process,
constitute the originality of depth. It is the dimension in which

264

SPACE

things or elements of tilings envelop each other, whereas breadth and
height are the dimensions in which they are juxtaposed.

One cannot, therefore, speak of a synthesis of depth, since a syn¬
thesis presupposes, or at least, like the Kantian synthesis, posits dis¬
crete terms, and since depth does not posit the multiplicity of per¬
spective appearances to be made explicit by analysis, but sees that
multiplicity only against the background of the stable thing. This
quasi-synthesis is elucidated if we understand it as temporal. When I
say that I see an object at a distance, I mean that I already hold it, or
that I still hold it, it is in the future or in the past as well as being in
space.1 It will perhaps be said that it is there only for me : in itself the
lamp which I perceive exists at the same time as I do, that distance is
between simultaneous objects, and that this simultaneity is contained
in the very meaning of perception. No doubt. But co-existence, which
in fact defines space, is not alien to time, but is the fact of two pheno¬
mena belonging to the same temporal wave. As for the relationship
of the perceived object to my perception, it does not unite them in
space and outside time: they are contemporary . The ‘order of co-
existents’ is inseparable from the ‘order of sequences’, or rather time
is not only the consciousness of a sequence. Perception provides me
with a ‘field of presence’2 in the broad sense, extending in two dimen¬
sions: the here-there dimension and the past-present-future dimen¬
sion. The second elucidates the first. I ‘hold’, I ‘have’ the distant
object without any explicit positing of the spatial perspective (ap¬
parent size and shape) as I still ‘have in hand’3 the immediate past
without any distortion and without any interposed ‘recollection’. If
we want to talk about synthesis, it will be, as Husserl says, a ‘transi¬
tional synthesis’, which does not link disparate perspectives, but
brings about the ‘passage’ from one to the other. Psychology has in¬
volved itself in endless difficulties by trying to base memory on the
possession of certain contents or recollections, the present traces (in
the body or the unconscious) of the abolished past, for from these
traces we can never come to understand the recognition of the past
as past. In the same way we shall never come to understand the per¬
ception of distance if we start from contents presented, so to speak,
all equidistant, a flat projection of the world, as recollections are a
projection of the past in the present. And just as memory can be
understood only as a direct possession of the past with no interposed
contents, so the perception of distance can be understood only as a
being in the distance which links up with being where it appears.

1 The idea of depth as a spatio-temporal dimension is indicated by Straus:
Vom Sinn der Sinne , pp. 302 and 306.

2 Husserl, Pnisenzfetd . It is defined in Zeitbewusstsein , pp, 32-5.

3 Ibid.

265

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

Memory is built out of the progressive and continuous passing of one
instant into another, and the interlocking of each one, with its whole
horizon, in the thickness of its successor. The same continuous transi¬
tion implies the object as it is out there, with, in short, its ‘real’ size
as I should see it if I were beside it, in the perception that I have of it
from here. Just as there is no possibility of engaging in any discussion
of the ‘conservation of recollections’, but only of a certain way of
seeing time which brings out the past as an inalienable dimension of
consciousness, there is no problem of distance, distance being im¬
mediately visible provided that we can find the living present in
which it is constituted.

As we pointed out at the beginning, we have to rediscover beneath
depth as a relation between things or even between planes, which is
objectified depth detached from experience and transformed into
breadth, a primordial depth, which confers upon the other its signifi¬
cance, and which is the thickness of a medium devoid of any thing.
At those times when we allow ourselves simply to be in the world
without actively assuming it, or in cases of illness favouring this
passive attitude, different planes are no longer distinguishable, and
colours are no longer condensed into superficial colours, but are
diffused round about objects and become atmospheric colours. For
example, the patient who writes on a sheet of paper has to penetrate a
certain thickness of whiteness with his pen before reaching the paper.
This voluminosity varies with the colour in question, and is, as it
were, the expression of its qualitative essence.1 There is, then, a depth
which does not yet operate between objects, which, a fortiori , does
not yet assess the distance between them, and which is simply the
opening of perception upon some ghost thing as yet scarcely quali¬
fied. Even in normal perception depth is not initially applicable to
things. Just as top and bottom, right and left are not given to the
subject with the perceived contents, and are at each moment consti¬
tuted with a spatial level in relation to which things arrange them¬
selves — in the same way depth and size come to things in virtue of
their being situated in relation to a level of distances and sizes,2
which defines the far and the near, the great and the small, before any
object arises to provide us with a standard for comparison. When we
say that an object is huge or tiny, nearby or far away, it is often with¬
out any comparison, even implicit, with any other object, or even with
the size and objective position of our own body, but merely in rela¬
tion to a certain ‘scope’ of our gestures, a certain ‘hold’ of the pheno¬
menal body on its surroundings. If we refused to recognize this

1 Gelb and Goldstein, Uber den Wegfall der Wahrnehmung von Oberflachen -
farben .

3 Wertheimer, Experimentelle Studies Anhang, pp. 259-61.

266

SPACE

rootedness of sizes and distances, we should be sent from one ‘stan¬
dard’ object to another and fail ever to understand how sizes or dis¬
tances can exist for us. The pathological experience of micropsy or
macropsy, altering as it does the apparent size of all the objects in the
field, leaves no standard in relation to which objects can appear
either larger or smaller than usual, and is to be understood only
by reference to a pre-objective standard of distances and sizes.
Thus depth cannot be understood as belonging to the thought of
an acosmic subject, but as a possibility of a subject involved in the
world.

This analysis of depth links up with the one which we have tried to
make of height and breadth. If, in this section, we first of all set depth
over against the other dimensions, this was merely because they ap¬
pear, at first sight, to be concerned with the relationships of things
among themselves, whereas depth immediately reveals the link be¬
tween the subject and space. But we saw above that in reality the
vertical and horizontal too are ultimately to be defined as the best
hold our body can take upon the world. Breadth and height, as rela¬
tions between objects, are derivative, and, viewed in their primary
significance, they too are ‘existential’ dimensions. We cannot be con¬
tent to say with Lagneau and Alain that height and breadth pre¬
suppose depth because a spectacle on a single plane supposes the
equidistance of all its parts from the plane of my face: this analysis
concerns only breadth, height and depth already objectified, and not
the experience which opens these dimensions to us. The vertical and
the horizontal, the near and the far are abstract designations for one
single form of being in a situation, and they presuppose the same
setting face to face of subject and world.

Movement is a displacement or change of position, even if it can¬
not be defined as such. As we initially encountered an idea of posi¬
tion which defines it in terms of relationships in objective space, so
there is an objective conception of movement which defines it in
terms of relations within the world, taking the experience of the
world for granted. And just as we had to trace back the origin of
the positing of space to the pre-objective situation or locality of the
subject fastening himself on to his environment, so we shall have to
rediscover, beneath the objective idea of movement, a pre-objective
experience from which it borrows its significance, apd in which move¬
ment, still linked to the person perceiving it, is a variation of the
subject’s hold on his world. When we try to think of movement, and
arrive at a philosophy of movement, we immediately place ourselves
in a critical or verificatory attitude, we ask ourselves what precisely
is given to us in movement, we make ready to reject appearances in
t 267

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

order to reach the truth concerning movement, and we remain un¬
aware that it is precisely this attitude which reduces the phenomenon
and must prevent us from coming to grips with it, because it intro¬
duces, with the notion of truth in itself, assumptions liable to conceal
from me the genesis of movement for me. Suppose that I throw a
stone. It hurtles across the garden. For a moment it becomes an in¬
distinct meteor-like object, and then a stone again when it falls to the
ground some distance away. If I want to think ‘clearly’ about the
phenomenon, it has to be decomposed. The stone itself, I shall say,
is in reality not modified by movement. It is the same stone that I
held in my hand, and that I now find again on the ground at the end
of its flight, and therefore it is the same stone that moved through the
air. Movement is merely an accidental attribute of the moving body,
and it is not, so to speak, seen in the stone. It can be only a change in
the relations between the stone and its surroundings. We can speak
of movement only so long as it is the same stone which persists
through the different relations with those surroundings. If, on the
other hand, I suppose that the stone is abolished on arriving at point
P, and that another identical stone arises out of nothingness at point
P' which is as close as we like to make it to the first, we no longer have
one single movement, but two. There is, then, no movement without
a moving body which bears it uninterruptedly from start to finish.
Since it is in no way inherent in the moving body, and consists wholly
in its relations with its surroundings, movement cannot dispense with
an external landmark, and indeed there is no way of attributing it
strictly to the ‘body in motion’ rather than to the landmark. Once
the distinction has been established between the body in motion and
movement, there is no movement without a moving body, no move¬
ment without an objective landmark, and no absolute movement.
Nevertheless this idea of movement is in fact a negation of move¬
ment: to distinguish strictly between movement and the moving
object is to say that strictly speaking the ‘moving body’ does not move .
If the stone-in-motion is not in some way different from the stone at
rest, it is never in motion (nor for that matter at rest). As soon as we
bring in the idea of a moving body which remains the same through¬
out its motion, Zeno’s arguments become valid once more. It is, then,
useless to object that we must not regard motion as a series of dis¬
continuous positions successively occupied in a series of discon¬
tinuous instants, and that space and time are not made up from a
collection of discrete elements. For even if we consider two ultimate
instants and two ultimate points, the difference between them in each
case being smaller than any given quantity, and their differentiation
being at an incipient stage, the idea of a moving body identical
throughout the phases of motion excludes, as a mere appearance, the

268

SPACE

phenomenon of ‘shift’, and implies the idea of a spatial and temporal
position always identifiable in itself, even if it is not so for us, and
therefore that of a stone which always is and never changes. Even if
we invent a mathematical instrument which allows account to be
taken of an indefinite multiplicity of positions and instants, it is im¬
possible to conceive in one and the same moving body the very act
of transition which always occurs between two instants and two posi¬
tions, in whatever proximity to each other we choose them. So that,
in thinking clearly about movement, I do not understand how it can
ever begin for me, and be given to me as a phenomenon.

And yet I walk, I have the experience of movement in spite of the
demands and dilemmas of clear thought, which means, in defiance of
all reason, that I perceive movements without any
identical moving object, without any external land¬
mark and without any relativity. If we present to
a subject alternately two lines of light A and B, A
the subject sees a continuous movement from A
to B, then from B to A, then again from A to B
and so on, even though no intermediate position
or indeed the extreme positions be given for them- Fig. 1
selves; we have one single line ceaselessly moving
back and forth. It is, however, possible to bring out distinctly the
extreme positions by quickening up or slowing down the speed of
presentation. The stroboscopic movement then tends to be broken
up : the line appears first of all held in position A, the# suddenly frees
itself and jumps to position B. If we go on accelerating or slowing
down the rhythm, the stroboscopic movement comes to an end and
we are left with two simultaneous lines or two successive ones.1 The
perception of positions, therefore, varies inversely as that of move¬
ment. It is even possible to show that movement is never the successive
occupation, by a moving body, of every position between two ex¬
tremes. If, for the stroboscopic movement, we use white or coloured
figures on a black background, the space through which the move¬
ment extends is at no time illuminated or coloured by it. If, between
the extreme positions A and B, we interpose a short rod C, the rod is
at no time completed by the passing movement (Fig. 1). We have
not a ‘passage of the line’, but a pure ‘passage’. If we work with a
tachystoscope, the subject often perceives a movement without being
able to say what it is that moves. When it is a question of real move¬
ments, the situation is no different : if I watch workmen unloading a
lorry and throwing bricks from one to another, I see the man’s arm in
its initial and then in its final position, yet, although I do not see it in
any intermediate position, I have a vivid perception of its movement.

1 Wertheimer, Experimentelle Studien , pp. 212-14.

269

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

If I quickly move a pencil across a sheet of paper on which I have
marked a point, at no instant am I conscious of the pencil’s being over
the point; I see none of the intermediate positions and yet I am aware
of movement. Conversely, if I slow down the movement and succeed
in not losing sight of the pencil, at that very moment the impression
of motion disappears.1 The movement disappears at the very moment
when it conforms most closely with the definition which objective
thought gives of it. Thus one can obtain phenomena in which the mov¬
ing object appears only as caught up in movement. For such an object
moving is not passing successively through an indefinite series of
positions, it is given only as beginning, pursuing or completing its
movement. Consequently, even in cases where the moving object is
visible, movement does not bear to it the relation of an extrinsic
entity, a relation between it and the outside, and we shall be able to
have movement without any fixed mark. Indeed, if we project the
consecutive image of a movement on to a homogeneous field contain¬
ing no object and having no outline, the movement takes possession
of the whole space, and what is shifting is the whole visual field, as
in the Haunted House at the fair. If we project on to the screen the
post-image of a spiral revolving round its centre, in the absence of any
fixed framework, space itself vibrates and dilates from the centre to
the periphery.2 Finally, since motion is no longer a system of relations
external to the object in motion, nothing now prevents us from recog¬
nizing absolute movements, such as perception actually presents to
us constantly.

But to this description the objection can always be raised that it is
meaningless. The psychologist rejects the rational analysis of motion,
and when it is pointed out to him that all movement, in order to be
movement, must be movement of something, he replies that That has
no basis in psychological description’.3 But if what the psychologist
describes is a movement, it must be related to some one identical
thing which moves. If I place my watch on the table of my room, and
it suddenly disappears only to reappear a few seconds later on the
table in the next room, I do not say that there has been motion;4
there is motion only if the intermediate positions have been actually
occupied by the watch. Even though the psychologist may show that
stroboscopic motion is produced without any intermediate stimulus
between the extreme positions, and even that the luminous line A does
not travel through the space which separates it from B, that no light
is perceived between A and B during stroboscopic motion, and, in

1 Wertheimer, Experimented Studien , pp. 221-33.

2 Ibid., pp. 254-5. 3 Ibid., p. 245.

4 Linke, Phanomenologie und Experiment in der Frage der Bewegungsauffassung,

p. 653.

270

SPACE

fact, that I do not see the pencil or the workman’s arm between the
two extreme positions, the fact remains that in some way or other the
moving body must have been present at each point of the journey for
movement to be apparent, and though it is not perceptibly present in
all these places, it is thought of as there. What is true of movement is
true of change: when I say that the fakir changes an egg into a hand¬
kerchief, or that the magician changes himself into a bird on the roof
of his palace1 1 do not mean merely that an object or a being has dis¬
appeared and been immediately replaced by another. There must be
some internal relationship between what is abolished and what comes
into being; both must be two manifestations or two appearances, or
two stages of one and the same something which is presented succes¬
sively in two forms.2 In the same way the arrival of movement at a
point must be one with its departure from the ‘adjacent’ point, and
this takes place only if there is an object in motion which simul¬
taneously leaves one place and occupies another. ‘A something which
is apprehended as a circle would cease to count for us as a circle the
moment “roundness” or the identity of all the diameters, which is
essential to the circle, ceased to be present in it. Whether the circle
be perceived or visualized, is a matter of indifference; a common
specificness needs to be present which forces us in either case to
characterize as a circle the tiling presented to us, and to distinguish
it from any other phenomenon.’3 Similarly when we speak of a sensa¬
tion of movement, or of a consciousness sui generis of movement, or,
like the Gestalt psychologists, of a global movement, a phenomenon
<f> in which no moving object and no particular position of a moving
object is given, this is merely verbiage unless we say how ‘what is
given in this sensation or this phenomenon, or what is grasped
through them, is immediately conveyed (dokumentiert) as move¬
ment’.4 Perception of movement can be perception of movement and
recognition of it as such, only if it is apprehension of it with its sigru-
ficance as movement, and with all the instants which constitute it,
and in particular with the identity of the object in motion. Move¬
ment, the psychologist replies, is ‘one of those "psychic phenomena”
which, like given sense contents such as colour and form, are related
to the object, appearing as objective and not subjective, but which,
unlike other mental data, are not of a static but of a dynamic nature.
For example, the characteristic and specific “passing effect” is the
flesh and blood of movement which cannot be composed from ordi¬
nary visual contents’.5 Indeed it is not possible to build motion out

1 Linke, Phdnomenologie und Experiment in der Frage der Bewegungsauff as sung ,
po. 656-7.

2 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 660. 4 Ibid., p. 661.

6 Wertheimer, op. cit., p. 227.

271

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

of static perceptions. But we are not concerned with this, and there
is no question of trying to reduce movement to a state of rest. The
object at rest also needs identification. It cannot be said to be at rest
if it is constantly annihilated and recreated, and if it does not survive
through its different instantaneous presentations. The identity to
which we refer is, therefore, anterior to the distinction between move¬
ment and rest. Motion is nothing without a body in motion which
describes and provides it with unity. Here the metaphor of the dyna¬
mic phenomenon leads the psychologist astray: it seems to us that a
force itself ensures its unity, but this is because we always suppose
that someone is there to identify it in the development of its effects.
‘Dynamic phenomena’ take their unity from me who live through
them, and who effect their synthesis. Thus we pass from an idea of
movement which is destructive of it to an experience of movement
which tries to provide it with a basis, but also from this experience to
an idea without which, strictly speaking, the experience is meaning¬
less.

We cannot, then, regard either the psychologist or the logician as
vindicated, or rather both must be considered vindicated and we must
find a means of recognizing thesis and antithesis as both true. The
logician is right when he demands some constitution of the ‘dynamic

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moving object which we follow through its course — but he is wrong
when he presents the identity of the object in motion as an express
identity, and this he is forced to recognize himself. The psychologist,
on the other hand, when describing phenomena as faithfully as pos¬
sible, is led in spite of himself to put a moving body into movement,
but he recovers the advantage through the concrete way in which he
conceives this body. In the discussion which we have just followed,
and which serves to illustrate the everlasting debate between psycho¬
logy and logic, what, in the last resort, does Wertheimer mean? He
means that the perception of movement is not secondary to the per¬
ception of the moving object, that we have not a perception of the
latter here, then there, followed by an identification linking these posi¬
tions in a succession,1 that their diversity is not subsumed under any
transcendent unity, and that in short the identity of the object in
motion flows directly from ‘experience’.2 In other words, when the
psychologist speaks of movement as a phenomenon which embraces

1 The identity of the moving object, says Wertheimer, is not the fruit of a con¬
jecture: ‘Here and there this must be the same object’ (p. 187).

2 It is true that Wertheimer does not say in so many words that the perception
of motion embraces this immediate identity. He says so only implicitly, when he
accuses an intellectualist conception, which relates movement to a judgement, of
giving us an identity which ‘fliesst nicht direkt aus dem Erlebnis’ (p. 187).

272

SPACE

starting point A and arrival point B (ABJ, he does not mean that there
is no subject of movement, but that in no case is the subject of move¬
ment an object A initially given as present and static in its place: in
so far as there is movement, the moving object is caught up in that
movement. The psychologist would no doubt allow that there is, in
every movement, if not an object in motion, at least a mobile entity,
provided that this mobile entity is not confused with any of the static
figures which can be extracted by halting the movement at any point
on its course. And here he has the advantage over the logician. For,
through not having gone back to the experience of movement in¬
dependently of any preconceived notion about the world, tiie logician
is talking only about movement in itself, and expressing the problem
of movement in terms of being, which makes it insoluble in the last
resort. If we take, he says, different appearances ( Erscheinungen ) of
movement at different points on its course, they will be appearances
of one and the same movement only if they are appearances of one
and the same object in motion, of one and the same Erscheinende, of
one and the same something which presents itself ( dcirstellt ) through
them all. But the moving object needs to be posited as a being apart
only if its appearances at different points have themselves been
brought into being as discrete perspectives. The logician knows, oil
principle, only positing* consciousness, and it is this postulate, this
supposition of a wholly determinate world, of pure being, which be¬
devils Ills conception of multiplicity and consequently of synthesis.
The moving object or rather, as we have called it, the mobile entity,
is not identical beneath the phases of movement, it is identical in
them. It is not because I find the same stone on the ground that I
believe in its identity throughout its movement. It is, on the contrary,
because I perceived it as identical during that movement— with an
implicit identity which remains to be described — that 1 go to pick it
up and recover it. We shall not find in the stone-in-movement every¬
thing that we know in other ways about the stone, if what I perceive
is a circle, says the logician, all its diameters are equal. But, on this
basis, we should equally have to put into the perceived circle all the
properties which the geometer has been able and will be able to dis¬
cover in it. Now it is the circle as a thing in the world which possesses
in advance and in itself all the properties which analysis is destined
to discover in it. The circular trunks of trees had already, before
Euclid, the properties that Euclid discovered in them. But in the
circle as a phenomenon, as it appeared to the Greeks before Euclid,
the square of the tangent was not equal to the product of the whole
chord and its exterior portion: the square and the product did not
appear in the phenomenon, nor necessarily did the equal radii. The
* ‘thetic’ (Translator’s note).

273

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

moving object, as object of an indefinite series of explicit and con¬
cordant perceptions, has properties, the mobile entity has only a
style. What is impossible is that the perceived circle should have un¬
equal diameters or that movement should exist without any mobile
entity. But for all that, the perceived circle does not have equal dia¬
meters because it has no diameter at all: it is conveyed to me, and is
recognizable and distinguishable from any other figure by its circular
physiognomy, and not by any of the ‘properties* which positing*
thought may subsequently discover in it. Similarly movement does
not necessarily presuppose a moving object, that is, an object defined
in terms of a collection of determinate properties; it is sufficient that
it should include ‘something that moves’, or at the most ‘something
coloured’ or ‘luminous’ without any actual colour or light. The logi¬
cian excludes this middle term: the radii of the circle must be either
equal or unequal, motion must either have or not have a moving
body. But he can do so only by taking the circle as a thing or by tak¬
ing movement in itself. Now we have seen that this amounts to
making motion impossible. The logician would have nothing to
conceive, not even an appearance of movement, if there were not a
movement anterior to the objective world which is the source of all
our assertions about movement, if there were not phenomena anterior
to being, which one can recognize, identify, and talk about, in a word,
which have a significance, even though they are not yet thematized.1
It is to this phenomenal layer that the psychologist leads us back. We
do not say that it is irrational or anti-logical. This would be so only
of the positing of a movement without an object in motion. Only the
explicit denial of the moving object would be contrary to the principle
of the excluded middle. We need to say merely that the phenomenal
layer is literally prelogicai and will always remain so. Our image of

* ‘thetic’ (Translator’s note).

1 l.inke eventually concedes (op. cjt., pp. 664-5) that the subject of movement
can be indeterminate (as when we see, in stroboscopic presentation, a triangle
moving towards a circle and being transformed into it), that the object in motion
has no need to be posited by an act of explicit perception, that it is merely a 'co-
target5 or *co apprehension1 in the perception of movement, that it is seen only
as the backs of objects or the space behind me are seen, and that finally the
identity of the moving object, like the unity of the thing perceived, is apprehended
through a categorial perception (Husserl) in which the category is operative with¬
out being conceived for itself. But the notion of categorial perception once more
calls the whole of the preceding analysis into question. For it amounts to intro¬
ducing non- the tic consciousness into the perception of movement, that is, as we
have shown, ii amounts to rejecting not only the a priori as essential necessity,
but also the Kantian notion of synthesis. Linkc's work belongs to, and is typical
of, the second period of Husserl ian phenomenology, which marks a transition
from the eidetic method or logicism of the earlier stage to the existentialism of
the last period.

274

SPACE

the world can be made up only in part of actual being, and we must
find a place in it for the phenomenal realm which surrounds being on
all sides* We are not asking the logician to take into consideration
experiences which, in the light of reason, are nonsensical or contra¬
dictory, we merely want to push back the boundaries of what makes
sense for us, and reset the narrow zone of thematic significance within
that of non-thematic significance which embraces it. The thematiza-
tion of movement ends with the identical object in motion and with
the relativity of movement, which means that it destroys movement.
If we want to take the phenomenon of movement seriously, we shall
need to conceive a world which is not made up only of things, but
which has in it also pure transitions. The something in transit which
we have recognized as necessary to the constitution of a change is to
be defined only in terms of the particular manner of its ‘passing’. For
example, the bird which flies across my garden is, during the time that
it is moving, merely a greyish power of flight and, generally speaking,
we shall see that things are defined primarily in terms of their ‘be¬
haviour’ and not in terms of their static ‘properties’. It is not I who
recognize, in each of the points and instants passed through, the same
bird defined by explicit characteristics, it is the bird in flight which
constitutes the unity of its movement, which changes its place, it is
this flurry of plumage still here, which is already there in a kind of
ubiquity, like the comet with its tail. Pre-objective being, the non-
thematized mobile entity sets merely the problem of implied space
and time which we have already discussed. We said that the parts of
space seen as breadth, height or depth, are not juxtaposed, but that
they co-exist because they are all drawn into the hold that our body
takes upon the world. This relation was already elucidated when we
showed that it is temporal before being spatial. Things co-exist in
space because they are present to the same perceiving subject and
enveloped in one and the same temporal wave. But the unity and
individuality of each temporal wave is possible only if it is wedged in
between the preceding and the following one, and if the same tem¬
poral pulsation which produces it still retains its predecessor and
anticipates its successor. It is objective time which is made up of suc¬
cessive moments. The lived present holds a past and a future within
its thickness. The phenomenon of movement merely displays spatial
and temporal implications in a more striking way. We know of move¬
ment and a moving entity without being in any way aware of objec¬
tive positions, as we know of an object at a distance and of its true
size without any interpretation, and as we know every moment the
place of an event in the thickness of our past without any express
recollection. Motion is a modulation of an already familiar setting,
and once more it leads us back to our central problem, which is how

275

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

this setting, which acts as a background to every act of consciousness,
comes to be constituted.1

The positing of an identical mobile object led to the relativity of
movement. Now that we have reintroduced movement into the object

1 This problem cannot be posed without already outrunning realism and, for
example, the celebrated descriptions of Bergson. Bergson’s alternative to the
multiplicity of things externally juxtaposed is the ‘multiplicity of fusion and inter¬
penetration’ of consciousness. He proceeds by way of dilution, speaking of con¬
sciousness as if it were a liquid in which instants and positions dissolve. In it he
looks for an element in which their dispersal is really abolished. The indivisible
action of my arm as I move it gives me that movement which I cannot find in
external space, because my movement, when put back into my internal life, re¬
discovers there the unity of inextension. The lived-through which Bergson sets
over against the thought-about is for him an experience, an immediate ‘datum’.
But this is to seek a solution in ambiguity. Space, motion and time cannot be
elucidated by discovering an ‘inner’ layer of experience in which their multiplicity
is erased and really abolished. For if this happens, neither space, nor movement,
nor time remains. The consciousness of my gesture, if it is truly a state of un¬
divided consciousness, is no longer consciousness of movement at all, but an
incommunicable quality which can tell us nothing about movement. As Kant
said, external experience is necessary to internal experience, which is indeed in¬
communicable, but incommunicable because meaningless. If, in virtue of the
principle of continuity, the past still belongs to the present and the present already
to the past, there is no longer any past or present. If consciousness snowballs upon
itself, it is, like the snowball and everything else, wholly in the present. If the
phases of movement gradually merge into one another, nothing is anywhere in
motion. The unity of time, space and movement cannot come about through any
coalescence, and cannot be understood either by any real operation. If conscious¬
ness is multiplicity, who is to gather together this multiplicity in order to experi¬
ence it as such, and if consciousness is fusion, how shall it come to know the
multiplicity of the moments which it fuses together? Against Bergson’s realism,
the Kantian idea of synthesis is seen to be valid, and consciousness as an agent of
this synthesis cannot be confused with any thing at all, even a fluid one. What is
for us primary and immediate, is a flux which does spread outwards like a liquid,
but which, in an active sense, bears itself along, which it cannot do without know¬
ing that it does so, and without drawing itself together in the same act whereby
it bears itself along — it is that ‘time which does not pass’ of which Kant some¬
where speaks. For us, then, the unity of movement is not a real unity. But neither
is multiplicity real, and what we object to in the idea of synthesis in Kant, as in
certain Kantian texts of Husserl, is precisely that it presupposes, at least theoretic¬
ally, a real multiplicity which consciousness has to surmount. What for us is
primary consciousness is not a transcendental Ego freely positing before itself a
multiplicity in itself, and constituting it throughout from start to finish, it is an 7
which dominates diversity only with the help of time, and for whom freedom itself
is a destiny, so that I am never conscious of being the absolute creator of time,
of composing the movement through which I live, I have the impression that it is
the mobile entity itself which changes its position, and which effects the passage
from one instant or one position to another. This relative and prepersonal / who
provides the basis for the phenomenon of movement, and in general the phe¬
nomenon of the real, clearly demands some elucidation. Let us say for the moment
that we prefer, to the notion of synthesis, that of synopsis, which does not yet
point to an explicit positing of diversity.

276

SPACE

in motion, this is to be interpreted in one sense only : it is in the mov¬
ing object that it begins, and from there spreads into the field. I can¬
not force myself to see the stone as motionless, and the garden and
myself as in motion. Motion is not a hypothesis, the probability of
which is measured as in physical theory by the number of facts
which it co-ordinates. That would give only possible movement,
whereas movement is a fact. The stone is not conceived, but seen, in
motion. For the hypothesis: ‘It is the stone which is moving’ would
have no distinctive meaning, and would be indistinguishable from
the hypothesis: ‘It is the garden which is moving’, if motion both in
fact and for reflection amounted to a mere change of relationships.
It therefore inhabits the stone. And yet are we to recognize the psy¬
chologist’s realism as fully justified? Are we going to put motion into
the stone as a quality? It does not presuppose any relationship to an
expressly perceived object, and remains possible in a perfectly homo¬
geneous field. The fact remains that every object in motion is given
in a field. Just as we need a mobile entity in movement, we need a
basis for movement. It has been wrongly asserted that the edges of the
visual field always furnish an objectively stable point.1 Once again,
the edge of the visual field is not a real line. Our visual field is not
neatly cut out of our objective world, and is not a fragment with
sharp edges like the landscape framed by the window. We see as far
as our hold on things extends, far beyond the zone of clear vision,
and even behind us. When we reach the limits of the visual ftfld, we
do not pass from vision to non-vision: the gramophone playing in
the next room, and not expressly seen by me, still counts in my visual
field. Conversely, what We see is always in certain respects not seen:
there must be hidden sides of things, and things ‘behind us’, if there
is to be a ‘front’ of things, and things ‘in front of’ us, in short, percep¬
tion. The limits of the visual field are a necessary stage in the or¬
ganization of the world, and not an objective outline. But it is never¬
theless true that an object crosses our visual field, and changes its
place in it, and that movement has no meaning outside this relation¬
ship. According as we give to a certain part of the field the value of
figure or background, it appears to us to be moving or at rest. If we
are on a ship sailing along the coast, it is true, as Leibnitz said, that
we can watch the coast flowing by in front of us, or take it as a fixed
point and feel the boat in motion. Do we then concede the logician
his case? Not at all, for to say that motion is a structural pheno¬
menon is not to say that it is ‘relative’. The very peculiar relationship
which constitutes movement does not exist between objects , and is
one which the psychologist, far from overlooking it, describes better
than the logician. It is the coast which slips by if we keep our eyes
1 Wertheimer, op. cit., pp. 255-6.

277

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

fixed on the rail, and the boat which glides along if we look at the
coast. Of two points of light seen in the dark, one static and the other
moving, it is the one which one is looking at which appears to be in
motion.1 The cloud floats over the steeple and the river flows under
the bridge, if it is the cloud and the river that we are looking at. The
steeple falls across the sky and the bridge slides over a static- river if
we are looking at the steeple or the bridge.

What makes part of the field count as an object in motion, and an¬
other as the background, is the way in which we establish our rela¬
tions with them by the act of looking. The stone flies through the air.
What do these words mean, other than that our gaze, lodged and
anchored in the garden, is attracted by the stone and, so to speak,
drags at its anchors? The relation between the moving object and its
background passes through our body. How is this bodily mediation
to be conceived? How does it come about that the relations of objects
to it can differentiate them as in motion or at rest ? Is not our body an
object, and does it not itself need to be determinate in relation to
rest and movement? It is often said that when we move our eyes,
objects remain static for us because we take account of the shift of
the eyes and that, finding it exactly proportionate to the change of
appearances, we conclude in favour of the immobility of objects. In
fact, if we are not conscious of any movement of the eye, as in the
case of a passive shift of the gaze, the object seems to move. If, in
paresis of the oculo-motor muscles, we have the illusion of a move¬
ment of the eye, without any apparent change in the relation of ob¬
jects to the eye, we think we see a movement of the object. It seems
at first as if, the relation of the object to our eye, as it is imprinted on
the retina, being given to consciousness, the state of rest or degree of
movement of objects is arrived at by a process of subtraction, in
which we take into account the shift or immobility of our eye. In
fact, this analysis is entirely artificial, and such as to conceal from us
the real relationship between our body and the spectacle. When I
transfer my gaze from one object to another, 1 am unaware of my
eye as an object, as a globe set in an orbit, of its movement or state of
rest in objective_space,_or_of_what-these-thraw-upon-the-retina.-The-
figures for the alleged calculation are not given to me. The immobility
of the thing is not interred from the act of looking, it is strictly simul¬
taneous with it, and the two phenomena envelop each other: what
we have is not two terms of an algebraic expression, but two
‘moments’ in an organization which embraces them both. My eye for

1 The laws governing the phenomenon would seem, then, to need more precise
statement: what is certain is that there are laws, and that the perception of move¬
ment, even when it is ambiguous, is not arbitrary and depends on the static point.
Cf. Duncker, Vber induzierte Bewegung*

278

SPACE

me is a certain power of making contact with things, and not a screen
on which they are projected. The relation of my eye to the object is
not given to me in the form of a geometrical projection of the object
in the eye, but as it were a hold taken by my eye upon the object, in¬
distinct in marginal vision, but closer and more definite when I focus
upon the object. What I lack when my eye moves passively, is not the
objective representation of its shift in the orbit, which in any case is
not given to me, but the exact gearing of my gaze to objects, without
which they are incapable of fixity, or indeed of genuine movement:
for when I press on my eyeball, I do not perceive a true movement,
the things themselves are not moving, but only a thin film on their
surface. In short, in cases of oculo-motor paresis, I do not explain the
constancy of the retinal image in terms of movement on the part of
the object, but I experience that the grip of my gaze on the object
does not relax, my gaze carries it and displaces it along with itself.
Thus my eye is never in the perception of an object. If we can ever
speak of movement without an object in motion, it is pre-eminently
in the case of our own body. The movement of my eye towards the
thing upon which it is about to focus is not the displacement of an
object in relation to another object, but progress towards reality. My
eye is in motion or at rest in relation to a thing which it is approach¬
ing or from which it is receding. In so far as the body provides the
perception of movement with the ground or basis which it needs in
order to become established, it is as a power of perception, rooted in
a certain domain and geared to a world. Rest and movement appear
between an object which, in itself, is not determinate in relation to
either, and my body of which, as an object, the same is true when my
body anchors itself in certain objects. Like top and bottom, motion is
a phenomenon of levels, every movement presupposing a certain
anchorage which is variable. So much can validly be said when we
talk obscurely about the relativity of movement. Now what precisely
is the anchorage and how does it constitute a background at rest ? It
is not an explicit perception. The points of anchorage, when we focus
on them, are not objects. The steeple begins to move only when I
leave the sky in the margin of vision. It is essential to the alleged fixed
points underlying motion that they should not be posited in present
knowledge and that they should always be ‘already there*. They do
not present themselves directly to perception, they circumvent it and
encompass it by a preconscious process, the results of which strike us
as ready made. Cases of ambiguous perception in which we can at
will choose our anchorage are those in which our perception is arti¬
ficially cut off from its context and its past, in which we do not per¬
ceive with our whole being, in which we play a game with our body
and with that generality which enables it at any time to break with

279

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

any historical commitment and to function on its own account,
although we can break with a human world, we cannot help focusing
our eyes — which means that as long as we live we remain committed,
if not in a human setting, at least in a physical one— and for any given
focus of the gaze, perception is not arbitrary. Still less is it arbitrary
when the life of the body is integrated to our concrete existence. I
can at will see my own train or the train next to it in motion whether
on the one hand I do nothing or on the other consider the illusions of
motion. But ‘when I am playing at cards in my compartment, I see
the neighbouring train move off, even if it is really mine which is
starting; when I look at the other train and try to pick out someone,
then it is my own train which is set in motion’.1 The compartment
which we happen to occupy is ‘at rest’, its walls are ‘vertical’ and the
landscape slips by before our eyes, and on a hill the firs seen through
the window appear to us to slope. If we stand at the window, we
return to the great world beyond our small one, the firs straighten
themselves and remain stationary, and the train leans with the slope
and speeds through the countryside. The relativity of motion reduces
itself to the power which we have of changing our domain within the
great world. Once involved in a setting, we see motion appear before
us as an absolute. Provided that we take into account, not only acts
of explicit knowledge, cogitations 7 but also that more occult act,
ahways in the past, by which we gave ourselves a world, provided that
we recognize a non-thetic * consciousness, we can allow what the psy¬
chologist calls absolute movement without falling into the difficulties
of realism, and understand the phenomenon of movement without
allowing our logic to destroy it.

We have so far considered, as do traditional philosophy and psy¬
chology, only the perception of space , that is, the knowledge that a
disinterested subject might acquire of the spatial relationships be¬
tween objects and their geometrical characteristics. And yet, even in
analysing this abstract function, which is far from covering the whole
of our experience of space, we have been led to bring out, as the
condition of spatiality, the establishment of the subject in a setting,
and finally his inherence in a world. In other words, we have been
forced to recognize that spatial perception is a structural pheno¬
menon and is comprehensible only within a perceptual field which
contributes in its entirety to motivating the spatial perception by
suggesting to the subject a possible anchorage. The traditional prob¬
lem of the perception of space and perception generally must be

1 Koffka, Perception , p. 578.

* I.e., non-positing (Translators note).

280

SPACE

reintegrated into a vaster problem. To ask how one can, in an ex¬
plicit act, determine spatial relationships and objects with their ‘pro¬
perties’, is to ask a second order question, to give as primary an act
which appears only against the background of an already familiar
world, to admit that one has not yet become conscious of the ex¬
perience of the world. In the natural attitude, I do not have percep¬
tions, I do not posit this object as beside that one, along with their
objective relationships, I have a flow of experiences which imply and
explain each other both simultaneously and successively. Paris for
me is not an object of many facets, a collection of perceptions, nor is
it the law governing all these perceptions. Just as a person gives evi¬
dence of the same emotional essence in his gestures with his hands, in
his way of walking and in the sound of his voice, each express percep¬
tion occurring in my journey through Paris — the cafes, people’s
faces, the poplars along the quays, the bends of the Seine — stands
out against the city’s whole being, and merely confirms that there is a
certain style or a certain significance which Paris possesses. And when
I arrived there for the first time, the first roads that I saw as I left the
station were, like the first words spoken by a stranger, simply mani¬
festations of a still ambiguous essence, but one already unlike any
other. Just as we do not see the eyes of a familiar face, but simply its
look and its expression, so we perceive hardly any object. There is
present a latent significance, diffused throughout the landscape or
the city, which we find in something specific and self-evident which
we feel no need to define. Ambiguous perceptions alone emerge as
explicit acts: perceptions, that is, to which we ourselves give a signifi¬
cance through the attitude which we take up, or which answer ques¬
tions which we put to ourselves. They cannot be of any use in the
analysis of the perceptual field, since they are extracted from it at the
very outset, since they presuppose it and since we come by them by
making use of precisely those set groupings with which we have
become familiar in dealing with the world.

An initial perception independent of any background is inconceiv¬
able. Every perception presupposes, on the perceiving subject’s part,
a certain past, and the abstract function of perception, as a coming
together of objects, implies some more occult act by which we elabor¬
ate our environment. Under mescalin it happens that approaching
objects appear to grow smaller. A limb or other part of the body, the
hand, mouth or tongue seems enormous, and the rest of the body is
felt as a mere appendage to it.1 The walls of the room are 150 yards
apart, and beyond the walls is merely an empty vastness. The
stretched-out hand is as high as the wall, and external space and

1 Mayer-Gross and Stein, Vber einige Abdnderungen der Sinnestatigkeit irn
Meskalinrausck , p. 375.

281

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

bodily space are divorced from each other to the extent that the
subject has the impression of eating ‘from one dimension to the
other’.1 Sometimes motion is no longer seen, and people seem to be
transported magically from one place to another.2 The subject is alone
and forlorn in empty space, ‘he complains that all he can see clearly
is the space between things, and that this space is empty. Objects are
in a way still there, but not as one would expect. . . .’3 Men are like
puppets and their movements are performed in a dreamlike slow-
motion. The leaves on the trees lose their armature and organization:
every point on the leaf has the same value as every other.4 One
schizophrenic says : ‘A bird is twittering in the garden. I can hear the
bird and I know that it is twittering, but that it is a bird and that it is
twittering, the two things seem so remote from each other. . . . There
is a gulf between them, as if the bird and the twittering had nothing
to do with each other.’ 5 Another schizophrenic can no longer manage
to ‘understand’ the clock, that is, in the first place the movement of
the hands from one position to another, and especially the connec¬
tion of this movement with the drive of the mechanism, the ‘working’
of the clock.6 These disturbances do not affect perception as know¬
ledge of the world: the oversized parts of the body, the too small
objects near at hand are not posited as such; for the patient the walls

football field for a normal person. The subject is well aware that
his food and his own body reside in the same space, since he takes
food with his hand. Space is ‘empty’, and yet all the objects of per¬
ception are there. The disturbance does not affect the information
which may be derived from perception, but discloses beneath ‘per¬
ception’ a deeper life of consciousness. Even where there is failure to
perceive, as with regard to movement, the perceptual deficiency ap¬
pears as no more than an extreme case of a more general disturbance
of the process of relating phenomena to each other. There is a bird
and there is twittering, but the bird no longer twitters. There is a
movement of the clock hands, and a spring, but the clock no longer
‘goes’. In the same way certain parts of the body are enlarged out of
all proportion, and adjacent objects made too small because the
whole picture no longer forms a system. Now, if the world is atom¬
ized or dislocated, this is because one’s own body has ceased to be a

1 Mayer-Gross and Stein, Vber einige Abanderungen der Sinnestatigkeit im
Meskalinrausck, p. 377.

2 Ibid., p. 381.

3 Fischer, Zeitstruktur und Schizophrenic , p. 572.

4 Mayer-Gross and Stein, op. cit., p. 380.

6 Fischer, op. cit., pp. 558-9.

0 Fischer, Raum-Zeitsiruktur und Denkstdrung in der Schizophrenic , pp. 247
and ff.

282

SPACE

knowing body, and has ceased to draw together all objects in its one
grip; and this debasement of the body into an organism must itself
be attributed to the collapse of time, which no longer rises towards a
future but falls back on itself. ‘Once I was a man, with a soul and a
living body ( Leib ) and now I am no more than a being (IFese/j), . . ,
Now there remains merely the organism (Korper) and the soul is
dead. ... I hear and see, but no longer know anything, and living is
now a problem for me. ... I now live on in eternity. . , , The
branches sway on the trees, other people come and go in the room,

but for me time no longer passes - Thinking has changed, and

there is no longer any style - What is the future? It can no longer

be reached, . , . Everything is in suspense. . . . Everything is mono¬
tonous, morning, noon, evening, past, present and future. Everything
is constantly beginning all over again/1 The perception of space is
not a particular class of ‘states of consciousness’ or acts. Its modali¬
ties are always an expression of the total life of the subject, the energy
with which he tends towards a future through his body and his world.2

We thus find ourselves led to a broadening of our investigation.
Once the experience of spatiality is related to our implantation in the
world, there will always be a primary spatiality for each modality of
this implantation. When, for example, the world of clear and arti¬
culate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its
world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in
the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infil¬
trates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost de¬
stroying my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my
perceptual look-out from which I watch the outlines of objects mov¬
ing by at a distance. Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with
me and its unity is the mystical unity of the mana. Even shouts or a
distant light people it only vaguely, and then it comes to life in its
entirety; it is pure depth without foreground or background, without
surfaces and without any distance separating it from me.3 All space
for the reflecting mind is sustained by thinking which relates its parts
to each other, but in this case the flunking starts from nowhere. On
the contrary, it is from the heart of nocturnal space that I become
united with it. The distress felt by neuropaths in the night is caused
by the fact that it brings home to us our contingency, the uncaused
and tireless impulse which drives us to seek an anchorage and to sur¬
mount ourselves in things, without any guarantee that we shall always

1 Fischer, Zetistruktur und Schizophrenic > p. 560.

2 The schizopiiremc symptom is never anything but a path towards the schizo¬
phrenic person.’ Kronfeld, quoted by Fischer, Zur KUnik und Psychology des
Raumlebens, p. 61.

3 Minkowski, Le Temps vecu , p. 394.

283

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

find them. But there is a still more striking experience of unreality
than night provides : I can at night retain the general setting of the
daytime, as when I grope about in my flat, and in any case night is
included in the general framework of nature, and there is something
reassuring and earthly even in pitch black space. During sleep, on the
other hand, I hold the world present to me only in order to keep it at
a distance, and I revert to the subjective sources of my existence. The
phantasms of dreams reveal still more effectively that general spa-
tiality within which clear space and observable objects are embedded.
Let us consider, for example, the themes of rising and falling so fre¬
quently met in dreams, as indeed in mythology and poetry. It is well
known that the appearance of these themes in dreams can be related
to concomitant respiratory states or sexual drives, and it is a first
step to recognize the vital and sexual significance of up and down.
But these explanations do not get us very far, for dreamed-of eleva¬
tion or falling are not to be found in visible space, as are the waking
perceptions associated with desire and the movement of breathing.
We must understand why at a given moment the dreamer lends him¬
self wholly to the physical facts of respiration and desire, and thus
fills them with a general and symbolic significance to the extent of
seeing them appear in the dream simply as an image — for example,
the image of a great bird hovering, which, hit by a shot, fails and is
reduced to a small heap of charred paper. We must understand how
respiratory or sexual events, which have a place in objective space,
are drawn away from it in the dream state, and settle in a different
theatre. But we shall not succeed in doing so unless we endow the
body, even in the waking state, with an emblematic value. Between
our emotions, desires and bodily attitudes, there is not only a con¬
tingent connection or even an analogical relationship : if I say that in
disappointment I am downcast, it is not only because it is accom¬
panied by gestures expressing prostration in virtue of the laws govern¬
ing nervous mechanisms, or because I discover between the objects
of my desire and my desire itself the same relationship as exists be¬
tween an object placed high above me and my gesture towards it.
The movement upwards as a direction in physical space, and that of
desire towards its objective are mutually symbolical, because they
both express the same essential structure of our being, being situated
in relation to an environment, of which we have already stated that
this structure alone gives significance to the directions up and down
in the physical world. When we speak of an elevated or a low mora¬
lity, we are not extending to the mental a relationship the full signifi¬
cance of which is to be found only in the physical world, we are
making use of ‘a direction of significance which, so to speak, runs
through the various regional spheres and receives a particular signifi-

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cance (spatial, auditory, spiritual, mental, etc.) in each one’.1 The
phantasms of dreaming, of mythology, the favourite images of each
man or indeed poetic imagery, are not linked to their meaning by a
relation of sign to significance, like the one existing between a tele¬
phone number and the name of the subscriber; they really contain
their meaning, which is not a notional meaning, but a direction of our
existence. When I dream that lam flying or falling, the whole sig¬
nificance of the dream is contained in the flight or the fall, as long as
I do not reduce them to their physical appearance in the waking
world, and so long as I take them with all their existential implica¬
tions. The bird which hovers, falls and becomes a handful of ash, does
not hover and fall in physical space; it rises and falls with the existen¬
tial tide running through it, or again it is the pulse of my existence,
its systole and diastole. The level of this tide at each moment con¬
ditions a space peopled with phantasms, just as, in waking life, our
dealings with the world which is offered to us condition a space
peopled with realities. There is a determining of up and down, and
in general of place, which precedes ‘perception’. Life and sexuality
haunt their world and their space. Primitive peoples, in so far as they
live in a world of myth, do not overstep this existential space, and
this is why for them dreams count just as much as perceptions. There
is a mythical space in which directions and positions are determined
by the residence in it of great affective entities. For primitive man,
knowing the whereabouts of the tribal encampment does not consist
in locating it in relation to some object serving as a landmark: for it
is the landmark of all landmarks — it is to tend towards it as towards
the natural abode of a certain peace or a certain joyfulness, just as, for
me, to know where my hand is is to link up with that agile power
which is for the moment dormant, but which I can take up and re¬
discover as my own. For the augur, right and left are the sources of
the lawful and the forbidden, just as for me iny right hand and my
left are respectively the incarnations of my skill and my awkwardness.
In dreaming as in myth we learn where the phenomenon is to be
found, by feeling that towards which our desire goes out, what our
hearts dreads, on what our life depends. Even in waking life things
are no different. I arrive in a village for my holidays, happy to leave
my work and my everyday surroundings, I settle in the village, and
it becomes the centre of my life. The low level of the river, gathering
in the maize crop or nutting are events for me. But if a friend comes
to see me bringing news from Paris, or if the press and radio tell me
that war threatens, I feel an exile in the village, shut off from real life,
pushed far away from everything. Our body and our perception
always summon us to take as the centre of the world that environment
1 L. Binswanger, Traum und Existenz, p. 674.

285

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

with which they present us. But this environment is not neces¬
sarily that of our own life. I can ‘be somewhere else* while staying
here, and if I am kept far away from what I love, I feel out of touch
with real life. The Bovary mentality and certain forms of home-sick¬
ness are examples of life which has become decentred. The maniac,
on the other hand, is centred wherever he is : chis mental space is
broad and luminous, and his thought, sensitive to all objects which
present themselves, flies from one to the other and is caught up in
their movement’.1 Besides the physical and geometrical distance
which stands between myself and all things, a ‘lived’ distance binds
me to things which count and exist for me, and links them to each
other. This distance measures the ‘scope’ of my life at every moment.2
Sometimes between myself and the events there is a certain amount of
play (, Spielraum ), which ensures that my freedom is preserved while
the events do not cease to concern me. Sometimes, on the other
hand, the lived distance is both too small and too great: the majority
of the events cease to count for me, while the nearest ones obsess me.
They enshroud me like night and rob me of my individuality and
freedom. I can literally no longer breathe; I am possessed.3 At the
same time events conglomerate among themselves. One patient feels
icy blasts of wind, a smell of chestnuts and the coolness of rain. Per¬
haps, he says, ‘at that very moment a person undergoing suggestions,
as I was, was walking in the rain past a roast chestnut stall’.4 * A
schizophrenic, who is under the care of both Minkowski and a village
priest, thinks that they have met to discuss him.6 An old schizophre¬
nic woman thinks that someone who is very like someone else has
known her.6 The shrinkage of lived space, which leaves no margin to
the patient, leaves no room for chance. Like space, causality, before
being a relation between objects, is based on my relation to things.
The ‘short-circuits’7 of delirious causality, no less than the long
causal chains of methodical thought, express ways of existing:8 ‘the

1 Bins ganger, Vber ideenfluchty pp. 78 and ff.

a Minkowski, Lex Notions de distance vecue et d’ampleur de la vie et leur applica¬
tion en psychopathologie . Cf. Le Temps vecu, Chap. VII.

8 ‘In the street, a kind of murmur completely envelops him; similarly he feels
deprived of his freedom as if there were always people present round about him ;
at the caf6 there seems to be something nebulous around him and he feels to be
trembling; and when the voices are particularly frequent and numerous, the
atmosphere round him is saturated with a kind of fire, and this produces a sort of
oppression inside the heart and lungs and something in the nature of a mist round
about his head.’ Minkowski, Le ProbUme des Hallucinations et le probldme de
VEspace, p. 69.

4 Ibid. 6 Le Temps vecu , p. 376,

8 Ibid., p. 379. 7 Ibid., p. 381.

8 That is why one can say with Scheler {Idealismus-Realismus, p. 298) that

Newton’s space translates the ‘emptiness of the heart*.

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SPACE

experience of space is interwoven . . . with all the other modes of
experience and all the other psychic data.’1 Clear space, that impar¬
tial space in which all objects are equally important and enjoy the
same right to existence, is not only surrounded, but also thoroughly
permeated by another spatiality thrown into relief by morbid devia¬
tions from the normal. A schizophrenic patient, in the mountains,
stops before a landscape. After a short time he feels a threat hanging
over him. There arises within him a special interest in everything
surrounding him, as if a question were being put to him from outside
to which he could find no answer. Suddenly the landscape is snatched
away from him by some alien force. It is as if a second sky, black and
boundless, were penetrating the blue sky of evening. This new sky is
empty, ‘subtle, invisible and terrifying’. Sometimes it moves in the
autumn landscape and at other times the landscape too moves.
Meanwhile, says the patient, ‘a question is being constantly put to
me; it is, as it were, an order either to rest or die, or else to push on
further’.2 This second space which cuts across visible space is the one
which is ceaselessly composed by our own way of projecting the
world, and the schizophrenic’s trouble consists simply in the fact that
the permanent project becomes dissociated from the objective world
as the latter is presented to perception, and withdraws, so to speak,
within itself. The schizophrenic no longer inhabits the common
property world, but a private world, and no longer gets as far as
geographical space: he dwells in ‘the landscape space’,3 and the land¬
scape itself, once cut off from the common property world, is consider¬
ably impoverished. Hence the schizophrenic questioning: everything
is amazing, absurd or unreal, because the impulse of existence towards
things has lost its energy, because it appears to itself in all its con¬
tingency and because the world can no longer be taken for granted.
In so far as the natural space talked about by traditional psychology
is by contrast reassuring and self-evident, this is because existence
rushes towards it, and being absorbed in it, is unaware of itself.

The description of human space could be developed indefinitely.4

1 Fischer, Zur Klinik und Psychologie des Raumerlebens , p. 70.

2 Fischer, Raum-Zeitstruktur und Denkstdrung in der Schizophrenic , p. 253.

3 E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne , p. 290.

4 One might show, for example, that aesthetic perception too opens up a new
spatiality, that the picture as a work of art is not in the space which it inhabits
as a physical thing and as a coloured canvas. That the dance evolves in an aimless
and unorientated space, that it is a suspension of our history, that in the dance
the subject and his world are no longer in opposition, no longer stand out one
against the background of the other, that in consequence the parts of the body
are no longer thrown into relief as in natural experience: the trunk is no longer
the ground from which movements arise and to which they sink back once per¬
formed; it now governs the dance and the movements of the limbs arc its
auxiliaries.

287

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

It is clear what fault objective thought will always find with it: have
these descriptions any philosophical value? That is to say: do they
teach us anything concerning the structure itself of consciousness, or
do they present us merely with contents of human experience? Are
the spaces belonging to dreams, myths and schizophrenia genuine
spaces ; can they exist and be thought of by themselves, or do they not
rather presuppose, as the condition of their possibility, geometrical
space and with it the pure constituting consciousness which deploys
it? The left, the area associated in the primitive mind with misfortune
and ill omen — or in my own body the side associated with awkward¬
ness — becomes specifically a direction only if I am first of all capable
of conceiving its relation to the right, and it is this relation which
ultimately gives a spatial significance to the terms between which it
stands. It is not, so to speak, with his anguish or his joy that primitive
man ‘aims at’ a certain space, as it is not with my pain that I know
where my injured foot is: anguish, joy and pain experienced are re¬
lated to a locality in objective space in which their empirical condi¬
tions are to be found. But for this agile consciousness, free in relation
to all contents and deploying them in space, those contents would
never be anywhere at all. If we think about the mythical experience
of space, and if we ask what it means, we shall necessarily find that
it rests on the consciousness of a single objective space, for a space
not objective and not unique would not be a space: is it not of the
essence of space to be the absolute ‘outside’, correlative to, but also
the negation of, subjectivity, and is it not of its essence to embrace
every being that one can imagine, since anything that one might want
to posit outside it would by that very fact be in relation to it, and
therefore in it? The dreamer dreams, and that is why his respiratory
movements and sexual drives are not taken for what they are, why
they break away from the moorings which tie them up with the world
and float before him in the form of dreams. But what precisely does
he in fact see? Are we to believe his account of it? If he is to know
what he sees and to understand his dream himself, he will have to
awaken. Immediately sexuality will repair to its genital retreat,
anxiety and its attendant phantasms will become once more what they
have always been: some respiratory obstruction at a point in the
chest. The murky space which invades the schizophrenic’s world can¬
not substantiate its claim to be a space without being related to clear
space. If the patient maintains that there is a second space round
about him, we must ask him: but where is it? In his efforts to locate
this phantom, he will conjure it away as a phantom. And since, as he
himself admits, objects are uninterruptedly present, he always re¬
tains, with clear space, the means of exorcising these spectres and
returning to the everyday world. The phantoms are fragments drawn

288

SPACE

from the clear world and borrow from it such standing as they are
capable of enjoying. In the same way, when we try to base geometri¬
cal space, along with its relationships within the world, on the pri¬
mary spatiality of existence, it will be objected that thought knows
only itself or things, that a spatiality of the subject is inconceivable,
and that consequently the case we are putting is strictly meaningless.
It is true, we shall reply, that it has no thematic or explicit meaning,
and that it dissolves under objective thought. But it has a non-
thematic or implicit meaning, and this is not a lesser meaning , for
objective thought itself draws on the non-reflective, and presents itself
as an explicit expression of non-reflective consciousness, so that radi¬
cal reflection cannot consist in thematizing as parallel entities the
world, or space, and the non-temporal subject which thinks of them,
but must go further back and seize this thematizing act itself with the
horizons of implication which give it its significance. If reflection
consists in seeking the first-hand, or that by which the rest can exist
and be thought about, it cannot confine itself within objective
thought, but must think about those thematizing acts which posit
objective thought, and must restore their context. In other words,
objective thought rejects the alleged phenomena of dreams, myths
and of existence generally, because it finds that it cannot think clearly
about them, and that they mean nothing that can be thematized. It
rejects the fact or the real in the name of the possible and the self-
evident. But it fails to see that the self-evident itself is founded on a
fact. Analytical reflection believes that it knows what the dreamer or
the schizophrenic experience better than the dreamer or the schizo¬
phrenic himself. What is more, the philosopher believes that, in
reflection, he has a better knowledge of what he perceives than he has
in perception itself. And it is under these circumstances alone that he
is able to reject human spaces as confused appearances of the one
true, objective space. But by doubting the testimony of other people
about themselves, or of one’s own perception about itself, he de¬
prives himself of the right to declare absolutely true what he appre¬
hends as self-evident, even if, in this self-evidence, he is conscious of
having a pre-eminent understanding of the dreamer, the madman or
perception. We cannot have it both ways: either the person who ex¬
periences something knows at the time what he is experiencing, in
which case the madman, the dreamer or the subject of perception
must be taken at their word, and we merely need to confirm that their
language in fact expresses what they are experiencing. Or else the
person with the experience is no judge of what he experiences, and in
that case the test of self-evidence may be an illusion. In order to divest
the experience of dreams, myths or perception of all positive value,
and in order to reintegrate these various spaces to geometrical space,

289

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

we must to all intents and purposes deny that people ever dream, or
that they ever go mad, or ever really and truly perceive anything. As
long as we allow the existence of dreams, insanity or perception, at
least as so many forms of absence of reflection — and how can we not
do so if we want to leave some value to the testimony of conscious¬
ness, -without which no truth is possible?— we have no right to level
all experiences down to a single world, all modalities of existence
down to a single consciousness. In order to do so, we should need a
higher court of appeal to which to submit perceptual and phantasmal
consciousness, a self more intimate with myself than the self which
thinks up my dream or my perception when I confine myself to
dreaming or perceiving, which possesses the true substance of my
dream and my perception when I have only the appearance of it. But
the distinction itself between the appearance and the reality is made
neither in the world of the myth, nor in the diseased or infantile one.
The myth holds the essence within the appearance; the mythical phe¬
nomenon is not a representation, but a genuine presence. The daemon
of rain is present in each drop which falls after the incantation, as the
soul is present in each part of the body. Every ‘apparition’ ( Er -
scheinung ) is in this case an incarnation,1 and each entity is defined
not so much in terms of ‘properties’ as of physiognomic characteris¬
tics. So much is validly meant when we talk about infantile and
primitive animism: not that the child and primitive man perceive
objects which they try, as Comte says, to explain by intentions or
forms of consciousness — consciousness, like the object, belongs to
positing thought — but because things are taken for the incarnation
of what they express, and because their human significance is com¬
pressed into them and presents itself literally as what they mean. A
shadow passing or the creaking of branches have each a meaning;
everywhere there are warnings with no one who issues them.2 Since
mythical consciousness has not yet arrived at the notion of a thing or
of objective truth, how can it undertake a critical examination of that
which it thinks it experiences; where can it find a fixed point at which
to stop and become aware of itself as pure consciousness, and per¬
ceive, beyond its phantasms, the real world? A schizophrenic feels
that a brush placed near his window is coining nearer to him and.
entering his head, and yet he never ceases to be aware that the brush
is over there.® If he looks towards the window, he still perceives it.
The brush, as an identifiable term in an explicit perception, is not in
the patient’s head as a material mass. But the patient’s head is for
him not that object which everyone can see, and which he himself

1 Cassirer, Philosophic der Symbolischen Formen, T. Ill, p. 80.

* Ibid., p. 82.

3 L. Binswanger, Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathoiogie, p. 630.

290

SPACE

sees in a mirror: it is the listening and observing post which he feels
at the top of his body, that power of joining up with all objects
through sight and hearing. In the same way, the brush which presents
itself to the senses is merely an envelope or a phantom. The true
brush, the stiff, prickly entity which is incarnated in these appear¬
ances, is concentrated in the gaze; it has moved from the window,
leaving there only its lifeless shell. No appeal to explicit perception
can arouse the patient from this dream, since he has no quarrel with
explicit perception, and holds only that it proves nothing against
what he experiences. ‘Can’t you hear my voices?’ a patient asks the
doctor; and she comes resignedly to the conclusion: ‘I am the only
one who hears them then.’1 What protects the sane man against
delirium or hallucination, is not his critical powers, but the structure
of his space: objects remain before him, keeping their distance and,
as Malebranche said speaking of Adam, touching him only with re¬
spect. What brings about both hallucinations and myths is a shrink¬
age in the space directly experienced, a rooting of things in our body,
the overwhelming proximity of the object, the oneness of man and
the world, which is, not indeed abolished, but repressed by everyday
perception or by objective thought, and which philosophical con¬
sciousness rediscovers. It is true that if I reflect on the consciousness
of positions and directions in myths, dreams and in perception, if I
posit and establish them in accordance with the methods of objective
thinking, I bring to light in them once more the relationships of geo¬
metrical space. The conclusion from this is not that they were there
already, but on the contrary that genuine reflection is not of this
kind. In order to realize what is the meaning of mythical or schizo¬
phrenic space, we have no means other than that of resuscitating in
ourselves, in our present perception, the relationship of the subject
and his world which analytical reflection does away with. We must
recognize as anterior to ‘sense-giving acts’ ( Bedeutungsgebende Ak-
ten) of theoretical and positing thought, ‘expressive experiences’
(Ausdruckserlebnisse); as anterior to the sign significance ( Zeichen -
Sinn), the expressive significance (Ausdrucks-Sinn), and finally as
anterior to any subsuming of content under form, the symbolical
‘pregnancy’2 of form in content.

Does this mean that psychologism is vindicated? Since there are as
many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences, and since we do
not allow ourselves to anticipate, in infantile, diseased or primitive
experience, the forms of adult, normal and civilized experience, are
we not imprisoning each type of subjectivity, and ultimately each

1 Minkowski, Le Probleme des hallucinations et le probleme de Vespace ,
p. 64.

2 Cassirer, op. cit., p. 80.

291

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

consciousness, in its own private life ? Have we not substituted for
the rationalist cogito which discovers a universal constituting con¬
sciousness in myself, the psychologist’s cogito, which remains incom¬
municable within the experience of its life ? Are we not defining sub¬
jectivity as the identity of each person with that experience ? Is it not
the case that inquiry into the nature of space and, generally speaking,
into nascent experience, prior to their objectification, and the decision
to scrutinize experience itself for its significance, in short phenomeno¬
logy, ends with the negation of being and significance? Are not mere
appearance and opinion being brought back under the name of the
phenomenon? Is not the origin of precise knowledge being identified
with a decision as unwarrantable as the one which shuts up the mad¬
man in his madness, and is not the last word of this wisdom to lead
us back to the anguish of idle and solitary subjectivity? These are
doubts which need to be dispelled. Mythical or dream-like conscious¬
ness, insanity and perception are not, in so far as they are different,
hermetically sealed within themselves ; they are not small islands of
experience cut off from each other, and from which there is no
escape. We have refused to make geometrical space immanent in
mythical space, and generally, to subordinate all experience to an
absolute consciousness of this experience, a consciousness which
would assign to it its place in the general scheme of truth, because
unity of experience thus understood makes its variety incomprehen¬
sible. But mythical consciousness does indeed open on to a horizon
of possible objectifications. Primitive man lives his myths against a
sufficiently articulate perceptual background for the activities of daily
life, fishing, hunting and dealings with civilized people, to be possible.
The myth itself, however diffuse, has an identifiable significance for
primitive man, simply because it docs form a world, that is, a whole
in which each element has meaningful relations with the rest. It is
true that mythical consciousness is not a consciousness of any thing.
That is to say that subjectively it is a flux, that it does not become
static and thus does not know itself. Objectively, it does not posit
before itself terms definable as a certain number of properties, which
can be isolated from one another and which are in fact interlinked.
But it is not borne away by each of its pulsations, otherwise it would
not be conscious of anything at all. It does not stand back from its
noemata, but on the other hand, if it passed away with each one of
them, and if it did not tentatively suggest objectification, it would not
crystallize itself in myths. We have tried to rescue mythical conscious¬
ness from those premature rationalizations which, as with Comte,
for example, make the myth incomprehensible, because they look to
it for an explanation of the world and an anticipation of science,
whereas it is a projection of existence and an expression of the human

292

SPACE

condition. But understanding myth is not believing in it, and if all
myths are true, it is in so far as they can be set in a phenomenology
of mind which shows their function in arriving at awareness, and
which ultimately bases their own significance on the significance
they have for the philosopher.

In the same way, though it is indeed from the dreamer that I was
last night that I require an account of the dream, the dreamer himself
offers no account, and the person who does so is awake. Bereft of
the waking state, dreams would be no more than instantaneous
modulations, and so would not even exist for us. During the dream
itself, we do not leave the world behind : the dream space is segregated
from the space of clear thinking, but it uses all the latter’s articula¬
tions; the world obsesses us even during sleep, and it is about the
world that we dream. Similarly it is round about the world that in¬
sanity gravitates. Leaving aside those morbid, dream-like or delirious
states which endeavour to build a private domain out of fragments
of the macrocosm, we can say that the most advanced states of melan¬
cholia, in which the patient settles in the realm of death and, so to
speak, takes up his abode there, still make use of the structures of
being in the world, and borrow from it an element of being indispens¬
able to its own denial. This link between subjectivity and objectivity,
which already exists in mythical or childlike consciousness, and which
still survives in sleep or insanity, is to be found, a fortiori , in normal
experience. I never wholly live in varieties of human space, but am
always ultimately rooted in a natural and non-human space. As I
walk across the Place de la Concorde, and think of myself as totally
caught up in the city of Paris, I can rest my eyes on one stone of the
Tuileries wall, the Square disappears and there is then nothing but
this stone entirely without history: I can, furthermore, allow my gaze
to be absorbed by this yellowish, gritty surface, and then there is no
longer even a stone there, but merely the play of light upon an indefi¬
nite substance. My total perception is not compounded of such
analytical perceptions, but it is always capable of dissolving into
them, and my body, which through my habits ensures my insertion
into the human world, does so only by projecting me in the first
place into a natural world which can always be discerned underlying
the other, as the canvas underlies the picture and makes it appear
unsubstantial. Even if there is perception of what is desired through
desire, loved through love, hated through hate, it always forms round
a sensible nucleus, however small, and it is in the sensible that its
verification and its fullness are found. We have said that space is
existential; we might just as well have said that existence is spatial,
that is, that through an inner necessity it opens on to an ‘outside’, so
that one can speak of a mental space and a ‘world of meanings and

293

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

objects of thought which are constituted in terms of those meanings’.1
Human spaces present themselves as built on the basis of natural
space, and ‘non-objectifying acts’, to speak the language of Husserl,
as based on ‘objectifying acts’.2 The novelty of phenomenology does
not lie in denying the unity of experience, but in finding a different
basis for it than does classical rationalism. For objectifying acts are
not representations. Natural and primordial space is not geometrical
space, nor, correspondingly, is the unity of experience guaranteed by
any universal thinker arraying its contents before me and ensuring
that I possess complete knowledge of, and exercise complete power
over it. It is merely foreshadowed by the horizons of possible objecti¬
fication, and it frees me from every particular setting only because it
ties me to the world of nature or the in-itself, which includes all of
them. We must contrive to understand how, at a stroke, existence
projects round itself worlds which hide objectivity from me, at the
same time fastening upon it as the aim of the teleology of conscious¬
ness, by picking out these ‘worlds’ against the background of one
single natural world.

If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and
the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object. It has
often been said that consciousness, by definition, admits of no separa¬
tion of appearance and reality, and by this we are to understand that,
in our knowledge of ourselves, appearance is reality: if I think I see
or feel, I indubitably see or feel, whatever may be true of the external
object. Here reality appears in its entirety, real being and appearance
are one, and there is no reality other than the appearance. If this is
true, there is no possibility that illusion and perception should have
the same appearance, that my illusions should be perceptions with
no object or my perceptions true hallucinations. The truth of percep¬
tion and the falsity of illusion must be implanted in them in the shape
of some intrinsic characteristic, for otherwise the testimony of the
other senses, of later experience, or of other people, which would re¬
main the only possible criterion, would then become unreliable, and
we should never be aware of a perception or an illusion as such. If
the whole being of my perception and the whole being of my illusion

in tPia lvnv n nnoor +Vw=»« th** truth whir*h Hefinec nnp nriH thf»

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falsity which defines the other must be equally apparent. There will
be between them, therefore, a structural difference. True perception
will simply be a true perception. Illusion will be no perception at all,
and certainty will have to extend from the vision or sensation as
conceived to perception as constitutive of an object. The transparency
of consciousness implies the immanence and absolute certainty of the

1 L. Binswanger, Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathologies p. 617,

2 Logische Untersuchungen , T. II, Vth Unters., pp. 387 and ff.

294

SPACE

object. Yet it is of the nature of illusion not to present itself as such,
and it is necessary that I should be able, if not to perceive an unreal
object, at least to lose sight of its unreality; it is necessary that there
should be at least unawareness of failure to perceive, that the illusion
should not be what it seems to be, and that for once the reality of an
act of consciousness should be beyond its appearance.

Are we then to separate appearance and reality within the subject?
The difficulty is that once the break is made, it is irreparable: the
clearest appearance can henceforth be misleading, and this time it is
the phenomenon of truth which becomes impossible. We are not
faced with a choice between a philosophy of immanence or a rational¬
ism which accounts only for perception and truth, and a philosophy
of transcendence or absurdity which accounts only for illusion and
error. We know that there are errors only because we possess truth,
in the name of which we correct errors and recognize them as errors.
In the same way the express recognition of a truth is much more than
the mere existence within us of an unchallengeable idea, an immedi¬
ate faith in what is presented: it presupposes questioning, doubt, a
break with the immediate, and is the correction of any possible error.
Any rationalism admits of at least one absurdity, that of having to
be formulated as a thesis. Any philosophy of the absurd recognizes
some meaning at least in the affirmation of absurdity. I can remain in
the realm of the absurd only if I suspend all affirmation, if, like
Montaigne or the schizophrenic, I confine myself within an interroga¬
tion which I must not even formulate: for by formulating it I should
ask a question which, like any determinate question, would entail a
reply. If, in short, I face truth not with its negation, but with a state
of non-truth or ambiguity, the actual opacity of my existence. In the
same way, I can remain within the sphere of absolute self-evidence
only if I refuse to make any affirmation, or to take anything for
granted, if, as Husserl has it, I stand in wonder before the world,1 and
ceasing to be in league with it, I bring to light the flow of motivations
which bear me along in it, making my life wholly aware of itself, and
explicit. When I try to pass from this interrogative state to an affirma¬
tion, and a fortiori when I try to express myself, I crystallize an inde¬
finite collection of motives within an act of consciousness, I revert to
the implicit, that is, to the equivocal and to the world’s free play.2 My
absolute contact with myself, the identity of being and appearance
cannot be posited, but only lived as anterior to any affirmation. In
both cases, therefore, we have the same silence and the same void.
The experience of absurdity and that of absolute self-evidence are

1 Fink, Die phdnomenologische Philosophie Husserls in der gegenwdrtigen
Kritik, p. 350.

2 The problem of expression is referred to by Fink, op. cit., p. 382.

295

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

mutually implicatory, and even indistinguishable. The world appears
absurd, only if a demand for absolute consciousness ceaselessly dis¬
sociates from each other the meanings with which it swarms, and
conversely this demand is motivated by the conflict between those
meanings. Absolute self-evidence and the absurd are equivalent, not
merely as philosophical affirmations, but also as experiences.
Rationalism and scepticism draw their sustenance from an actual life
of consciousness which they both hypocritically take for granted,
without which they can be neither conceived nor even experienced.,
and in which it is impossible to say that everything has a significance ,
or that everything is nonsense , but only that there is significance . As
Pascal says, doctrines have only to be pressed a little to abound with
contradictions, and yet they give a first impression of clarity, and
have an initial significance. A truth seen against a background of
absurdity, and an absurdity which the teleology of consciousness
presumes to be able to convert into truth, such is the primary pheno¬
menon. To say that, in consciousness, appearance and reality are one,
or that they are separate, is to rule out consciousness of anything
whatsoever, even as appearance. Now — such is the true cogito — there
is consciousness of something, something shows itself, there is such
a thing as a phenomenon- Consciousness is neither the positing of
oneself, nor ignorance of oneself, it is not concealed from itself,
which means that there is nothing in it which does not in some way
announce itself to it, although it does not need to know this explicitly.
In consciousness, appearance is not being, but the phenomenon.
This new cogito9 because it is anterior to revealed truth and error,
makes both possible. The lived is certainly lived by me, nor am I
ignorant of the feelings which I repress, and in this sense there is no
unconscious. But I can experience more things than I represent to
myself, and my being is not reducible to what expressly appears to
me concerning myself. That which is merely lived is ambivalent; there
are feelings in me which I do not name, and also spurious states of
well-being to which I am not fully given over. The difference between
illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perception can be
read off only from perception itself. If, on a sunken path, I think I can
see, some distance away, a broad, fiat stone on the ground, which is
in reality a patch of sunlight, I cannot say that I ever see the flat stone
in the sense in which I am to see, as I draw nearer, the patch of sun¬
light. The flat stone, like all things at a distance, appears only in a
field of confused structure in which connections are not yet clearly
articulated. In this sense, the illusion, like the image, is not observ¬
able, which means that my body has no grip on it, and that I cannot
unfold it before me by any exploratory action. And yet, I am capable
of omitting this distinction and of falling into illusion. It is untrue

296

SPACE

that, if I confine myself to what I really see, I am never mistaken and
that sensation at least leaves no room for doubt. Every sensation is
already pregnant with a meaning, inserted into a configuration which
is either obscure or clear, and there is no sense-datum which remains
unchanged when I pass from the illusory stone to the real patch of
sunlight. The infallibility of sensation entails that of perception, and
would rule out illusion. I see the illusory stone in the sense that my
whole perceptual and motor field endows the bright spot with the
significance ‘stone on the path’. And already I prepare to feel under
my foot this smooth, firm surface. The fact is that correct and illusory
vision are not distinguishable in the way that adequate and inade¬
quate thought are: as thought, that is, which is respectively consum¬
mate and lacunary. I say that I perceive correctly when my body has
a precise hold on the spectacle, but that does not mean that my hold
is ever all-embracing; it would be so only if I had succeeded in reduc¬
ing to a state of articulate perception all the inner and outer horizons
of the object, which is in the nature of things impossible. In experienc¬
ing a perceived truth, I assume that the concordance so far experi¬
enced would hold for a more detailed observation; I place my con¬
fidence in the world. Perceiving is pinning one’s faith, at a stroke, in
a whole future of experiences, and doing so in a present which never
strictly guarantees the future; it is placing one’s belief in a world. It
is this opening upon a world which makes possible perceptual truth
and the actual effecting of a Wahr-Nehmung , thus enabling us to
‘cross out’ the previous illusion and regard it as null and void. Seeing,
some distance away in the margin of my visual field, a large moving
shadow, I look in that direction and the phantasm shrinks and takes
up its due place; it was simply a fly near my eye. I was conscious of
seeing a shadow and now I am conscious of having seen nothing more
than a fly . My adherence to the world enables me to allow for the
variations in the cogito , to favour one cogito at the expense of another
and to catch up with the truth of my thinking beyond its appearances.
In the very moment of illusion this possibility of correction was pre¬
sented to me, because illusion too makes use of this belief in the world
and is dependent upon it while contracting into a solid appearance,
and because in this way, always being open upon a horizon of pos¬
sible verifications, it does not cut me off from truth. But, for the same
reason, I am not immune from error, since the world which I seek to
achieve through each appearance, and which endows that appearance,
rightly or wrongly, with the weight of truth, never necessarily requires
this particular appearance. There is the absolute certainty of the
world in general, but not of any one thing in particular. Conscious¬
ness is removed from being, and from its own being, and at the same
time united with them, by the thickness of the world. The true cogito

297

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

is not the intimate communing of thought with the thought of that
thought: they meet only on passing through the world. The con¬
sciousness of the world is not based on self-consciousness : they are
strictly contemporary* There is a world for me because I am not un¬
aware of myself; and I am not concealed from myself because I have
a world. This pre-conscious possession of the world remains to be
analysed in the pre-reflective cogito.

298

THE THING AND THE
NATURAL WORLD

A THING has ‘characteristics’ or ‘properties’ which are stable, even
if they do not entirely serve to define it, and we propose to approach
the phenomenon of reality by studying perceptual constants. A thing
has in the first place its size and its shape throughout variations of
perspective which are merely apparent. We do not attribute these
appearances to the object itself, but regard them as an accidental
feature of our relations with it, and not as being of it. What do we
mean by this, and on what basis do we judge that form or size are
the form and size of the object ?

What is presented to us in the case of each object, the psychologist
will assert, are sizes and shapes which always vary with the perspec¬
tive, and it is conventional to regard^as true the size which the object
has when within reach, or the shape which it assumes when it is in a
plane parallel to the frontal elevation. These are no truer than any
other, but since this distance and this aspect are both typical, and
evolved with the help of our body, which is an ever-present guide for
this purpose, we can always recognize them, and so they themselves
provide us with a standard for fixing and distinguishing between
fleeting appearances; for constructing objectivity, in short. The
square viewed obliquely, as something roughly diamond-shaped * is
distinguished from a real diamond shape only if we keep the orienta¬
tion in mind, if, for example, we settle on the frontal aspect as the
crucial appearance, and relate any given appearance to what it would
become in this context. But this psychological reconstitution of ob¬
jective size or shape takes for granted what has to be explained,
namely a gamut of determinate sizes and shapes from which it is
sufficient to select one as the real size or shape. We have already stated
that in respect of one and the same retreating or revolving object I
do not have a set of ‘mental images’ which progressively diminish in

299

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

size, or become more and more distorted, and between which I make
a conventional choice. In so far as I account for my perception in
these terms, to that extent I am already introducing the world with
its objective shapes and sizes. The question is not only how one size
or shape, among all apparent sizes or shapes, is regarded as a con¬
stant; it is a much more searching one. It is a matter of understanding
how one determinate shape or size — true or even apparent— can
come to light before me, become crystallized in the flux of my ex¬
perience and, in short, be given to me. Or, more concisely still, how
can there be objectivity?

There would seem, at least at first glance, to be a way of evading
the question, namely by conceding that it is in fact never the case that
size and shape are perceived as attributes of a single object, and that
they are simply names for the relations between the parts of the phe¬
nomenal field. In this case the constancy of the real size or shape
which is maintained through the varying perspectives is merely the
constancy in the relations between the phenomenon and the con¬
ditions accompanying its presentation. For example, the true size of
my fountain-pen is not, as it were, a quality inherent in any of my
perceptions of the pen; it is not given or noted in a perception, like
red, warmth or sweetness. The fact that it remains constant is not
explained by my remembering any former experience in which I
observed it. It is the constant, or the law governing the variations of
the visual appearance in relation to the apparent distance. Reality is
not a crucial appearance underlying the rest, it is the framework of
relations with which all appearances tally. If I hold my pen near my
eyes so that it shuts out almost the whole scene before me, its real
size remains small, because the pen which hides everything is also a
pen seen at close quarters , and because this condition, which is
always conveyed to me in my perception, reduces the appearance
once more to modest proportions. The square which is presented to
me obliquely remains a square, not because this apparent diamond
shape brings to mind the familiar form of the square seen directly in
front of me, but because the diamond-shaped appearance in an ob¬
lique presentation is immediately identical to the square appearance
in a frontal presentation, because, along with each of these configura¬
tions, I am given that orientation of the object which makes it pos¬
sible, and because these shapes are presented in a context of relations
which, a priori , equate the various perspective presentations with each
other. The cube with its sides distorted by perspective nevertheless
remains a cube, not because I imagine the successive aspects of the
six faces if I turned the cube round in my hand, but because the
perspective distortions are not raw data, any more than is the per¬
fectly symmetrical shape which faces me. Each element of the cube,

300

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

if we unfold from it all the perceived significance, acquaints us with
the present point of view taken of it by the observer. A merely ap¬
parent shape or size is one with as yet no place in the tightly knit
system formed by phenomena and my body together. As soon as it
finds its place in that system, it finds its truth, and perspective distor¬
tion is no longer passively endured, but understood. The appearance
is misleading and in the literal sense an appearance only when it is
indeterminate. The question how there come to be true shapes or
sizes, or objective or real ones, amounts to asking how there are, for
us, determinate shapes. And there are determinate shapes like ‘a
square’ or ‘a diamond shape’, or any actual spatial configuration,
because our body as a point of view upon things, and things as ab¬
stract elements of one single world, form a system in which each
moment is immediately expressive of every other. A certain way of
directing my gaze in relation to the object signifies a certain appear¬
ance of the object and of neighbouring objects. In all its appearances
the object retains invariable characteristics, remains itself invariable
and is an object because all the possible values in relation to size and
shape which it can assume are bound up in advance in the formula of
its relations with the context. What we are affirming in the specific
being of the object, is in reality a facies totius universi which remains
unchanged, and in it is grounded the equivalence of all its appear¬
ances and the identity of its being. In following out the logic of ob¬
jective size and shape, we should, with Kant, see that it refers to the
positing of a world as a rigorously interrelated system, that we are
never enclosed within appearance, and that, in short, the object alone
is able fully to appear .

Thus we place ourselves directly within the object, we overlook the
psychologist’s problems, but have we really left them behind? When
it is said that the true size or shape are no more than the constant law
according to which the appearance, the distance and the orientation
vary, it is assumed that they can be treated as variables or measurable
sizes, and therefore that they are already determinate, when what we
are concerned with is precisely how they become so. Kant is right in
saying that perception is, by its nature, polarized towards the object.
But what is incomprehensible in his account is appearance as appear¬
ance. Since the perspective views of the object are directly and im¬
mediately set into the objective system of the world, the subject thinks
rather than perceives his perception and its truth. Perceptual con¬
sciousness does not give us perception as a body of organized know¬
ledge, or the size and shape of the object as laws ; the numerical speci¬
fications of science retrace the outline of a constitution of the world
which is already realized before shape and size come into being. Like
the scientist, Kant takes the results of this pre-scientific experience for

301

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

granted, and is enabled to ignore them only because he makes use of
them. When I contemplate before me the furniture in my room, the
table with its shape and size is for me not a law or rule governing the
parade of phenomena, and an invariable relationship: it is because I
perceive the table with its definite shape and size that I presume, for
every change of distance or orientation, a corresponding change of
shape and size, and not the reverse. Far from its being the case that
the thing is reducible to constant relationships, it is in the self-evi¬
dence of the thing that this constancy of relationships has its basis.
For science and objective thought, an apparently small object seen
a hundred yards away is indistinguishable from the same object seen
ten yards away at a greater angle, and the object is nothing but the
constant product of the distance multiplied by the apparent size. But
for me the perceiver, the object a hundred yards away is not real and
present in the sense in which it is at ten yards, and I identify the
object in all its positions, at all distances, in all appearances, in so
far as all the perspectives converge towards the perception which I
obtain at a certain distance and with a certain typical orientation.
This crucial perception ensures the unity of the perceptual process
and draws into it all other appearances. For each object, as for each
picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it
requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes
most of itself : at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a per¬
ception blurred through excess or deficiency. We therefore tend to¬
wards the maximum of visibility, and seek a better focus as with a
microscope.1 This is obtained through a certain balance between the
inner and outer horizon: a living body, seen at too close quarters,
and divorced from any background against which it can stand out,
is no longer a living body, but a mass of matter as outlandish as a
lunar landscape, as can be appreciated by inspecting a segment of
skin through a magnifying glass. Again, seen from too great a dis¬
tance, the body loses its living value, and is seen simply as a puppet
or automaton. The living body itself appears when its microstructure
is neither excessively nor insufficiently visible, and this moment
equally determines its real size and shape. The distance from me to

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which fluctuates round a norm. An oblique position of the object in
relation to me is not measured by the angle which it forms with the
plane of my face, but felt as a lack of balance, as an unequal distribu¬
tion of its influences upon me. The variations in appearance are not
so many increases or decreases in size, or real distortions. It is simply
that sometimes the parts mingle and become confused, at others they
link up into a clearly articulated whole, and reveal their wealth of

1 Schapp, BeitrSge zur Phdnomenologie der Wahrnehmung , pp. 59 and ff.

302

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

detail. There is one culminating point of my perception which simul¬
taneously satisfies these three norms, and towards which the whole
perceptual process tends. If I draw the object closer to me or turn it
round in my fingers in order ‘to see it better’, this is because each atti¬
tude of my body is for me, immediately, the power of achieving a
certain spectacle, and because each spectacle is what it is for me in a
certain kinaesthetic situation. In other words, because my body is
permanently stationed before things in order to perceive them and,
conversely, appearances are always enveloped for me in a certain
bodily attitude. In so far, therefore, as I know the relation of appear¬
ances to the kinaesthetic situation, this is not in virtue of any law or
in terms of any formula, but to the extent that I have a body, and that
through that body I am at grips with the world. And just as perceptual
attitudes are not known to me singly, but implicitly given as stages In
the act which leads to the optimum attitude, correspondingly the
correlative perspectives are not posited before me successively, but
present themselves only as so many steps towards the thing itself with
its size and shape. Kant saw clearly that the problem is not how deter¬
minate shapes and sizes make their appearance in my experience,
since without them there would be no experience, and since any inter¬
nal experience is possible only against the background of external
experience. But Kant’s conclusion from this was that I am a con¬
sciousness which embraces and constitutes the world, and this reflec¬
tive action caused him to overlook the phenomenon of the body and
that of the thing.

The fact is that if we want to describe it, we must say that my ex¬
perience breaks forth into things and transcends itself in them, be¬
cause it always comes into being within the framework of a certain
setting in relation to the world which is the definition of my body.
Sizes and shapes merely provide a modality for this comprehensive
hold on the world. The thing is big if my gaze cannot fully take it in,
small if it does so easily, and intermediate sizes are distinguishable
according as, when placed at an equal distance from me, they cause a
smaller or greater dilation of my eye, or an equal dilation at different
distances. The object is circular if, all its sides being equally near to
me, it imposes no deviation upon the regular curvature of my gaze, or
if those deviations which are imposed are attributable to the oblique
presentation, according to the knowledge of the world which is given
to me with my body.1 It is, therefore, quite true that any perception of

1 The constancy of forms and sizes in perception is therefore not an intellectual
function, but an existential one, which means that it has to be related to the pre-
logical act by which the subject takes up his place in the world. When a human
subject is placed at the centre of a sphere on which discs of equal diameter are
fixed, it is noticed that constancy is much more perfect in the horizontal than in

303

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

a thing, a shape or a size as real, any perceptual constancy refers back
to the positing of a world and of a system of experience in which my
body is inescapably linked with phenomena. But the system of ex¬
perience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me
from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved,
and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible
both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the
complete world as a horizon of every perception. In so far as I know
that a tree on the horizon remains what it is for closer perception, and
retains its real shape and size, it is simply that this horizon is the
horizon of my immediate environment, and that the gradual percep¬
tual possession of the things which it contains is guaranteed to me.
In other words, perceptual experiences hang together, are mutually
motivating and implicatory; the perception of the world is simply an
expansion of my field of presence without any outrunning of the
latter’s essential structures, and the body remains in it but at no time
becomes an object in it. The world is an open and indefinite unity in
which I have my place, as Kant shows in the Transcendental Dialec¬
tic, but as he seems to forget in the Analytic.

The qualities of the thing, its colour for example, or its hardness

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ties. The table is, and remains, brown throughout the varied play of
natural or artificial lighting. Now what, to begin with, is this real
colour, and how have we access to it? We shall be tempted to reply
that it is the colour which I most often see as belonging to the table,
the one which it assumes in daylight, a short distance away, under
‘normal’ conditions, which means those which occur most frequently.
When the distance is too great or when the light has a colour of its
own, as at sunset or under electric lighting, I substitute for the actual
colour a remembered one,* 1 which predominates because it is im¬
printed within me by numerous experiences. In this case the con¬
stancy of colour is a real constancy. But we have here no more than
an artificial reconstruction of the phenomenon. For, with regard to
perception itself, it cannot be said that the brown of the table pre¬
sents itself in all kinds of light as the same brown, the same quality
actually given by memory. A piece of white paper seen in shadow and
recognized for what it is, is not purely and simply white, it ‘does not

the vertical plane. The huge moon on the horizon contrasted with the very small
one at the zenith is merely a particular case of the same law. For apes, on the
other hand, vertical movement in trees is as natural as is horizontal movement
on the ground for us, with the result that vertical constancy is faultless. Koffka,
Principles of Gestalt Psychology , pp. 94 and ff.

1 Gedachtnisfarbe of Hering.

304

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

allow itself to be placed satisfactorily in the white-black series’.1
Given a white wall in the shade and a grey piece of paper in the light,
it cannot be said that the wall remains white and the paper grey; the
paper makes a greater impact on the eye,2 it is lighter and clearer,
whereas the wall is darker and duller, and what remains beneath the
variations of lighting is, so to speak, only the ‘substance of the
colour’.3 The alleged constancy of colours does not prevent ‘an in¬
dubitable modification during which we continue to receive in our
vision the fundamental quality and, so to speak, that which is sub¬
stantial in it’.4 This same reason will prevent us from treating the
constancy of colours as an ideal constancy attributable to the judge¬
ment. For a judgement capable of distinguishing within a given ap¬
pearance that element which is to be accounted for by the particular
lighting must lead ultimately to an identification of the object’s own
true colour, and we have seen that this does not in fact remain identi¬
cal. The weakness of both empiricism and intellectualism lies in their
refusing to recognize any colours other than those fixed qualities
which make their appearance in a reflective attitude, whereas colour
in living perception is a way into the thing. We must rid ourselves of
the illusion, encouraged by physics, that the perceived world is made
up of colour qualities. As painters have observed, there are few
colours in nature. The perception of colours is developed late in
children, and in any case follows upon the constitution of a world.
The Maoris have 3,000 names of colours, not because they perceive
a great many, but, on the contrary, because they fail to identify them
when they belong to objects structurally different from each other.5
As Scheler puts it, perception goes straight to the thing and by-passes
the colour, just as it is able to fasten upon the expression of a gaze
without noting the colour of the eyes. We shall not succeed in under¬
standing perception unless we take into account a colour function
which may remain even when the qualitative appearance is modified.
I say that my fountain-pen is black, and I see it as black under the
sun’s rays. But this blackness is less the sensible quality of blackness
than a sombre power which radiates from the object, even when it is
overlaid with reflected light, and it is visible only in the sense in which
moral blackness is visible. The real colour persists beneath appear¬
ances as the background persists beneath the figure, that is, not as a
seen or thought-of quality, but through a non-sensory presence.
Physics and also psychology give an arbitrary definition of colour,

1 Gelb, Die Farbenkonstanz der Sehdinge, p. 613.

2 It is eindringlicher.

3 Stumpf, quoted by Gelb, p. 598.

4 Gelb, op. cit., p. 671.

5 Katz 3 Der Aufhau der Farbwelt , pp. 4-5.

305

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

which in reality fits only one of its modes of appearance and has for
long obscured the rest. Hering requires that in the study and com¬
parison of colours we concern ourselves with only the pure colour,
leaving aside all external circumstances. We must work ‘not on the
colours which belong to a determinate object, but on a quale , whether
plane or pervading the whole of space, which subsists for itself with
no determinate vehicle’.1 The colours of the spectrum roughly fulfil
these conditions. But these coloured areas (. Flachenfarben ) are in
reality only one of the possible structures of colour, and already the
colour of a piece of paper or a surface colour ( Oberfldchenfarbe ) no
longer obeys the same laws. The differential thresholds are lower in
the case of surface colours than in coloured areas.2 Coloured areas
are indeed located at a distance, though vaguely; they have a spongy
appearance, whereas surface colours are dense and hold the gaze
upon their surface. Coloured areas, moreover, are always parallel to
the frontal plane, whereas surface colours may show any orientation.
Finally coloured areas are always more or less flat, and cannot, with¬
out losing their distinctive quality as such, assume a particular form
and appear curved or spread out over a surface.3 Yet both these
modes of appearance are to be found in psychologists* experiments,
where, moreover, they are often confused. But there are many others
about which psychologists have for long remained silent: the colour
of transparent bodies, which occupies the three dimensions of space
( Raumfatbe ); gloss ( Glanz ); glow (Gliiheri) ; brightness ( Leuchten ) and
generally the colour of lighting, which is so far from running into
that of the source of light that the painter can represent the former by
the distribution of light and shade on objects and omit the latter
altogether.4 We are predisposed to believe that we have here different
arrangements of a perception of colour which is in itself invariable,
different forms conferred upon one and the same sensible material.
In fact, we have different colour-functions in which the alleged
material disappears completely, since the act of patterning is effected
through a change in the sensible properties themselves. It is particu¬
larly true that the distinction between the lighting and the object’s
own colour is not the outcome of any intellectual analysis, or the
conferment of notional meanings on a sensible material, but a certain
organization of colour itself, the arrival at a structure lighting-thing

1 Quoted by Katz, Farbwelt , p. 67.

a Ackermann, Farbschwelle und Feldsiruktur .

3 Katz, Farbwelt , pp. 8-21.

4 Ibid., 47-8. Lighting is a phenomenal datum as immediate as surface colour.
The child sees it as a line of force running through the visual field, and that is
why the shadow behind objects and corresponding to it is immediately set in a
living relation to it: the child says that the shadow ‘is running away from the
light’. J. Piaget, La Causality physique chez Venfant , Chap. VIII, p. 21.

306

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

lighted, which we need to describe in greater detail, if we are to
understand the constancy of a thing’s ‘own’ colour.1

In gaslight a blue paper looks blue. And yet if we look at it with the
photometer we are surprised to see that it sends the same mixture of
rays to the eye as does a brown paper in daylight.2 A feebly lighted
white wall which, with the reservations already stated, appears white
to the unhampered vision, appears a bluish-grey if we look at it
through the window of a screen which hides the source of light. The
painter achieves the same result without a screen and manages to see
colours as they are determined by the quantity and quality of re¬
flected light, provided that he isolates them from their surrounding,
by half-closing his eyes, for example. This changed appearance is in¬
separable from a change of structure in the colour: by the act of inter¬
posing the screen between our eye and the spectacle, and half-closing
our eyes, we free the colours from the objectivity they acquire on the
surfaces of bodies and restore to them the simple state of areas of
light. We no longer see real bodies, such as the wall or the paper,
with a determinate colour and having their place in the world, but
coloured patches which are all situated on one and the same ‘fictional’
plane.3 How precisely does the screen work? We shall understand
this better if we observe the same phenomenon under different condi¬
tions. If we look successively through the eye-holes of two large
boxes painted respectively black and white on the inside, and one
illuminated faintly, the other powerfully, so that the quantity of light
received by the eye in each case is the same, and if we contrive that
inside the boxes there shall be no shadow or lack of uniformity in the
painting, they then become indistinguishable, and in each case we see
only an empty space permeated by grey. The whole effect is altered if
a piece of white paper is placed in the black box, or a piece of black
paper in the white one. Immediately the former appears as black and
strongly illuminated, the latter as white and faintly lit. Hence, for the
structure lighting-object lighted to be presented, at least two surfaces
of different reflecting power are needed.4 If we so arrange it that the
beam of an arc lamp falls exactly upon a black disc, and if the latter is

1 Indeed it has been shown (Gelb and Goldstein, Psychologische Analysen
Hirnpathohgisdttr Falle, Ober den Wegfali der Wahrnehnv/ng von Oberflache/h
farben ) that constancy of colours may be found in subjects who have lost the
power to receive either surface colour or lighting. It would appear that constancy
is a much more rudimentary phenomenon. It is met with in animals with varieties
of sensory apparatus simpler than the eye. The structure lighting-object lighted
is, therefore, a special and highly organized type of Constance. But it remains
necessary for a precise and objective constancy, and for a perception of things.
(Gelb, Die Farbenkonstanz der Sehdinge , p. 677.)

2 The experiment is already reported by Hering, Grundzuge der Lehre von Licht-
sinn , p. 15.

8 Gelb, Farbenkonstanz , p. 600. 4 Ibid., p. 673.

307

THF WORLD AS PERCEIVED

set in motion to eliminate the influence of the roughness which is
always present on its surface — the disc appears, like the rest of the
room, faintly lighted, and the beam of light is a whitish solid with the
disc as its base. If we then place a piece of white paper in front of the
disc, ‘immediately we see the disc “black”, the paper “white”, and
both under a strong light.’ 1 The transformation is so complete that
one has the impression of seeing a fresh disc. These experiments in
which the screen plays no part elucidate those in which it does: the
decisive factor in the phenomenon of constancy, which the screen
eliminates, and which may operate in free vision, is the articulation
of the totality of the field, the wealth and subtlety of its structures.
When he looks through the window of a screen, the subject can no
longer ‘dominate’ (uberschauen) the relationships introduced by
lighting, perceive, that is, in visible space, subordinated wholes, each
with its own distinctness, standing out one against the background of
another.2 When the painter half-closes his eyes, he does away with
the field’s organization in depth and with it, the precise contrasts of
lighting, so that there are no longer any determinate things with their
own colours. If the experiment with the white paper in the shadow
and the grey paper illuminated is repeated, and if the negative after¬
images of the two perceptions are projected on to a screen, it is ob¬
served that the phenomenon of constancy is not preserved, as if con¬
stancy and the structure lighting-lighted object could occur only in
things and not in the diffuse space of after-images.3 By admitting that
these structures depend on the organization of the field we im¬
mediately arrive at an understanding of all the empirical laws
governing the phenomenon of constancy.4 Firstly, that it is pro¬
portional to the size of the retinal area on to which the spectacle is
thrown, and the more pronounced in proportion as, in the relevant
retinal space, a more extensive and more richly articulated fragment
of the world is projected. That it is less perfect in peripheral than in
central vision, in monocular than in binocular vision, in brief than in
prolonged vision; that it is attenuated at a great distance; that it
varies with individuals according to the richness of their-pereeptual-
world, and finally that it is less perfect in coloured lighting, which
cancels out the superficial structure of objects, and brings the re¬
flecting potentialities of different surfaces to a common level, than in
colourless lighting which leaves these structural differences intact.5
The connection between the phenomenon of constancy, the articula¬
tion of the field and the phenomenon of lighting can therefore be
regarded as an established fact.

1 Gelb, Farbenkonstanz , p. 674. a Ibid., p. 675. 3 Ibid., p. 677.

4 These are the laws set out by Katz in Farbwelt.

6 Gelb, Farbenkonstanz , p. 677.

308

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

But this functional relation has so far failed to make clear either
the terms which it links, or consequently their concrete connection,
and the greatest benefit of the discovery would be lost if we were
content merely to establish a correlative variation between the three
terms taken in their ordinary sense. In what sense are we to say that
the colour of the object remains constant? What is the organization
of the spectacle and the field in which it is organized? What finally is
lighting ? Psychological induction remains blind as long as we fail to
draw together in one single phenomenon the three variables which it
connotes, and as long as it does not lead us by the hand to some
intuition in which the alleged ‘causes’ or ‘conditions’ of the pheno¬
menon of constancy shall appear as ‘moments’ of that phenomenon
and in an essential relation to it.1 Let us then consider the phenomena
which have just been revealed to us, and try to see how they motivate
each other in total perception. Let us look first at that peculiar mode
of the appearance of light or of colours which we call lighting. What
is peculiar about it? What occurs when a certain patch of light is
taken as lighting instead of being taken for granted? Only after cen¬
turies of painting did artists perceive that reflection on the eye with¬
out which the eye remains dull and sightless as in the paintings of the
early masters.2 The reflection is not seen as such, since it was in fact
able to remain unnoticed for so long, and yet it has its function in
perception, since its mere absence deprives objects and faces of all
life and expression. The reflection is seen only incidentally. It is not
presented to our perception as an objective, but as an auxiliary or
mediating element. It is not seen itself, but causes us to see the rest.
Reflections and lighting in photography are often badly reproduced
because they are transformed into things, and if, in a film for example,
a person goes into a cellar holding a lamp, we do not see the beam of
light as an immaterial entity exploring the darkness and picking out
objects, because it becomes solidified and can no longer display to us
the object at its far end. Light moving over a wall produces only pools
of dazzling brightness which are localized not on the wall, but on the

1 In fact the psychologist, however positivistic he tries to remain, certainly feels
himself that the whole value of inductive research is to lead us to a view of phe¬
nomena, and he never quite resists the temptation to hint, at least, at this new
coming to awareness. Thus P. Guillaume ( Traite de Psychologies p. 175), when
setting forth the laws governing the constancy of colours, writes that the eye
‘takes the lighting into account’. Our researches merely, in a sense, amplify this
concise statement. It means nothing in the context of a strictly positive approach.
The eye is not the mind, but a material organ. How could it ever take anything
‘into account’ ? It can do so only if we introduce the phenomenal body beside the
objective one, if we make a knowing-body of it, and if, in short, we substitute for
consciousness, as the subject of perception, existence, or being in the world
through a body.

2 Schapp, Beitrdge zur Phdnotnenologie der Wahrnehnmng, p. 91.

309

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

surface of the screen. Lighting and reflection, then, play their part
only if they remain in the background as discreet intermediaries, and
lead our gaze instead of arresting it.1 But what are we to understand
by that? When I am led through a strange apartment towards its
owner, there is someone who knows on my behalf, for whom the
unfolding of the visual spectacle has a meaning, and who moves
towards a goal, and I entrust or lend myself to this knowledge which
I do not possess. When some detail in a landscape, which I have been
unable to distinguish alone, is pointed out to me, there is someone
who has already seen it, who already knows where to stand and where
to look in order to see it. The lighting directs my gaze and causes me
to see the object, so that in a sense it knows and sees the object. If I
imagine a theatre with no audience in which the curtain rises upon
illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the spectacle is in
itself visible or ready to be seen, and that the light which probes the
back and foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the
scene through and through, in a way anticipates our vision. Con¬
versely our own vision merely takes up on its own account and
carries through the encompassing of the scene by those paths traced
out for it by the lighting, just as, when we hear a sentence, we are
surprised to discover the track of an alien thought. We perceive in
conformity with the light, as we think in conformity with other
people in verbal communication. And just as communication pre¬
supposes (even while outstripping and enriching it in the case of new
and authentic expression) a certain linguistic setting through which a
meaning resides in the words, so perception presupposes in us an
apparatus capable of responding to the promptings of light in
accordance with their sense * (that is, in accordance both with their
direction and their significance, which amount to one thing), of con¬
centrating diffuse visibility and completing what is merely fore¬
shadowed in the spectacle. This apparatus is the gaze, in other words
the natural correlation between appearances and our kinaesthetic un¬
foldings, something not known through a law, but experienced as the
involvement of our body in the typical structures of a world. Lighting
and the constancy of the thing illuminated, which is its correlative,
are directly dependent on our bodiiy situation. If, in a brightly lit
room, we observe a white disc placed in a shady corner, the con¬
stancy of the white is imperfect. It improves when we approach the
shady zone containing the disc. It becomes perfect when we actually

1 In order to describe the essential function of lighting, Katz borrows from
painters the term Lichtfuhrung (Farbwelt, pp. 379-81).

* The French word ‘sens’ may be equivalent to either ‘direction’ or ‘meaning’
in English (Translator’s note).

310

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

enter it.1 The shade does not become really a shade (and corres¬
pondingly the disc does not count as white) until it has ceased to be in
front of us as something to be seen, but surrounds us, becoming our
environment in which we establish ourselves. This phenomenon be¬
comes comprehensible only if the spectacle, far from being a collec¬
tion of objects, a mosaic of qualities arrayed before an acosmic
subject, steals round the subject and offers to come to terms with him.
The lighting is hot on the side of the object, it is what we assume,
what we take as the norm, whereas the object lighted stands out be¬
fore us and confronts us. The lighting is neither colour nor, in itself,
even light, it is anterior to the distinction between colours and
luminosities. This is why it always tends to become ‘neutral’ for us.
The penumbra in which we are becomes so natural that it is no longer
even perceived as penumbra. Electric lighting, which appears yellow
immediately upon leaving the daylight, soon ceases to have any
definite colour for us, and, if some remnant of daylight finds its way
into the room it is this ‘objectively neutral’ light which seems to have
a blue tint about it.2 We must not say that, since the yellow electric
lighting is perceived as yellow, we take account of it in the apprecia¬
tion of appearances and thus theoretically discover the actual colour
of objects. Nor must we say that as the yellow light becomes all-
embracing it is seen as daylight, and that in this way the colour of
other objects remains really constant. We must say that the yellow
light, in assuming the function of lighting, tends to become anterior
to any colour, tends towards absence of colour, and that corres¬
pondingly objects distribute the colours of the spectrum among
themselves according to the degree and mode of their resistance
to this new atmosphere. Every colour as a quale is therefore mediated
by a colour-function, and becomes determinate in relation to a level
which is variable. The level is laid down, and with it all the colour
values dependent upon it, as soon as we begin to live in the prevailing
atmosphere and re-allot to objects the colours of the spectrum in
accordance with the requirements of this basic convention. Taking up
our abode in a certain setting of colour, with the transposition which
it entails, is a bodily operation, and I cannot effect it otherwise than
by entering into the new atmosphere, because my body is my general
power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains,
the key to all those transpositions and equivalences which keep it
constant. Thus lighting is merely one element of a complex structure,
the others being the organization of the field as our body contrives it
and the thing illuminated in its constancy. The functional correlations

1 Gelb, Farbenkonstanz, p. 633.

* Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, pp. 255 and ff. See La Structure du
Comportement, pp. 108 and If.

311

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

which can be discovered between these three phenomena are merely
manifestations of their ‘essential co-existence’.1

This can be brought out more clearly by scrutinizing the two latter.
What are we to understand by the organization of the field? We have
seen that, if we insert a white paper into the beam of light thrown by
an arc lamp, the beam having hitherto been fused with the disc on to
which it falls, and perceived as a solid cone — immediately the beam
and the disc are dissociated and the lighting takes on the quality of
lighting. The introduction of the paper into the beam, by forcing us
clearly to recognize the ‘non-solidity’ of the cone of light, alters its
significance in relation to the disc supporting it and brings out its
quality as lighting. It is as if there were an incompatibility, vividly
experienced, between the sight of the illuminated paper and that of a
solid cone, and as if the significance of part of the spectacle induced a
reassessment of the significance of the whole. In the same way we
have seen that in the various parts of the visual field taken separately,
the distinctive colour of the object on the one hand and the lighting
on the other are indistinguishable, but that, in the visual field taken
as a whole and through a kind of reciprocal action in which each part
benefits from the configuration of the rest, a general effect of lighting
emerges and endows each local colour with its ‘true’ value. Here

again, it is as if the parts of the spectacle, being unable singly to
summon up the vision of lighting, made this possible by their union,
and also as if, into the colour values spread through the field, some¬
one read the possibility of a systematic transformation. When a
painter wants to depict some striking object, he does so less by apply¬
ing a bright colour to that object than by a suitable distribution of
light and shade on surrounding ones.2 If we manage momentarily to
glimpse a hollowed motive as one in relief, a seal for example, we
suddenly have the impression of a magic lighting emanating from the
interior of the object. This is because the light and shade relationships
on the seal are then the opposite of what they should be by reason of
the lighting at the time. If we move a lamp round a bust at a constant
distance from it, even when the lamp itself is invisible we see the
rotation of the source of light in the complex of changing light and
hat is given.3

There is, then, a logic of lighting’4 or again a ‘synthesis of light¬
ing’,6 a compossibilitv of the parts of the visual field, which may well
be specified in disjunctive propositions, as when the painter tries to
justify his work to an art critic, but which is primarily experienced as
the consistency of the picture or the reality of the spectacle. What is

1 W 'esenskoexistenz, Gelb, Farbenkonstanz, p. 671.

2 Katz, Farbwelt, p. 36. 3 Ibid., pp. 379-81.

4 Ibid., p. 213. 3 Ibid., p. 456.

312

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

more, there is a total logic of the picture or the spectacle, a felt
coherence of the colours, spatial forms and significance of the object.
A picture in an art gallery, when seen at an appropriate distance, has
its internal lighting which confers upon each patch of colours not only
its colour value, but also a certain representative value. Seen at too
close quarters it falls under the prevailing lighting of the art gallery,
and the colours ‘then no longer act in a representative manner, and
no longer present us with the image of certain objects, but act as so
much daubing on a canvas’.1 If, on looking at a mountain scene, we
adopt a critical attitude and isolate part of the field, then the colour
itself changes, and this green, which was meadow green, when taken
out of its context, loses its thickness and its colour as well as its
representative value.2 A colour is never merely a colour, but the
colour of a certain object, and the blue of a carpet would never be the
same blue were it not a woolly blue. The colours of the visual field, as
we earlier saw, form an ordered system round a dominant which is
the lighting taken as a level. We now begin to see a deeper meaning in
the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical
forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form
a system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which
assigns to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the
rest, and which ‘cancel out’ as unreal all stray data; it is entirely
sustained by the certainty of the world. In this way we finally see the
true significance of perceptual constancies. The constancy of colour
is only an abstract component of the constancy of things, which in
turn is grounded in the primordial constancy of the world as the
horizon of all our experiences. It is not, then, because I perceive
constant colours beneath the variety of lightings that I believe in the
existence of things, nor is the thing a collection of constant charac¬
teristics. It is, on the contrary, in so far as my perception is in itself
open upon a world and on things that I discover constant colours.

The phenomenon of constancy is a general one. It has been found
possible to speak of a constancy of sounds,3 temperatures, weights,4
and indeed data which are in the strict sense tactile, a constancy itself
mediated by certain structures, certain ‘modes of appearance’ of
phenomena in each of these sensory fields. The perception of weights
remains the same whatever the muscles called into play, and whatever
their initial position. When an object is lifted with the eyes closed, its
weight is no different, whether or not the hand carries an extra weight
(and whether this weight exerts pressure on the back of the hand or a

1 Katz; Farbwelt , p. 382. 2 Ibid., p. 261.

3 Von Hornbostel, Das Rdumliche Horen.

4 Werner, Grundfragen der Intensltdtspsychologie, pp. 68 and ff. Fischel, Trans-
for mat Ion sersche inungen bei Gewichtshebungen, pp. 342 and ff.

313

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

pull on the palm) — whether the hand is free or is fastened in such a
way that the fingers work alone — whether one or more fingers per¬
form the task— whether the object be raised with the hand or the
head, foot or teeth — and finally whether the object is lifted in the air
or in water. Thus the tactile impression is ‘interpreted’ in the light of
the nature and number of the parts of the body brought into play,
and even of the physical circumstances under which it appears; thus
do impressions, in themselves highly variable, such as pressure on the
skin of the forehead and on the hand, mediate the same perception of
weight. It is impossible here to suppose that the interpretation rests
on any explicit induction, and that, in the previous experiment, the
subject was able to measure the incidence of these different variables
on the actual weight of the object. He has probably never had occa¬
sion to interpret frontal pressure in terms of weight or, in order to
find the ordinary scale of weights, to add to the local impression of
the fingers the weight of the arm reduced through immersion in
water. Even if it be conceded that, through the use of his body, the
subject has gradually evolved a scale of weight-equivalences, and
learned that a certain impression furnished through the muscles of
the fingers is equivalent to another derived from the whole hand,
such inductions, since they are applied to parts of the body which
have never been used for the lifting of weights, must at all events be
made within the framework of a global bodily knowledge which
systematically embraces all its parts. The constancy of weight is not a
real constancy, or the permanence within us of some ‘impression of
weight’, gained through those parts of the body most often used,
and reached by association in the remaining cases. Is the weight of
the object, then, to be regarded as a theoretical invariant, and the
perception of weight a judgement by means of which, the impression
and the bodily and physical circumstances in which it occurs being in
each case brought into relation with each other, we discern by a kind
of natural physics a constant relationship between these two vari¬
ables ? But this can be so only in a manner of speaking : we do not
know our body and the power, weight and scope of our organs as an
engineer knows (lie machine which he has assembled part by part.
And when we compare the work of our hand with that of our fingers,
it is against the background of a comprehensive potentiality of our
limb as hitherto known that they are distinguished or identified, and
in the unity of an ‘I can’ that the operations of different parts of the
body appear equivalent. Correspondingly the ‘impressions’ provided
by each one of them are not really distinct and related to each other
merely by an explicit interpretation, but present themselves im¬
mediately as different manifestations of the ‘real’ weight, and the pre-
objective unity of the thing is correlative to the pre-objective unity of

314

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

the body. Thus the weight appears as the identifiable property of a
thing against the background of our body as a system of equivalent
gestures. This analysis of the perception of weight elucidates the
whole of tactile perception: the movement of one’s own body is to
touch what lighting is to vision.1 All tactile perception, while opening
itself to an objective ‘property’, includes a bodily component; the
tactile localization of an object, for example, assigns to it its place in
relation to the cardinal points of the body image. This property
which, at first sight, draws an absolute distinction between touch and
vision, in fact makes it possible to draw them together. It is true that
the visible object is in front of us and not on our eye, but we have
seen that in the last resort the visible position, size or shape are
determined by the direction, scope and hold which our gaze has upon
them. It is true that passive touch (for example touch inside the ear or
nose, and generally in all parts of the body ordinarily covered) tells
us hardly anything but the state of our own body and almost nothing
about the object. Even on the most sensitive parts of our tactile
surface, pressure without movement produces a scarcely identifiable
phenomenon.2 But there is also passive vision, with no gaze specific¬
ally directed, as in the case of a dazzling light, which does not unfold
an objective space before Us, and in which the light ceases to be light
and becomes something painful which invades our eye itself. And like
the exploratory gaze of true vision, the ‘knowing touch’3 projects us
outside our body through movement. When one of my hands touches
the other, the hand that moves functions as subject and the other as
object.4 There are tactile phenomena, alleged tactile qualities, like
roughness and smoothness, which disappear completely if the ex¬
ploratory movement is eliminated. Movement and time are not only
an objective condition of knowing touch, but a phenomenal com¬
ponent of tactile data. They bring about the patterning of tactile
phenomena, just as light shows up the configuration of a visible
surface.5 Smoothness is not a collection of similar pressures, but the
way in which a surface utilizes the time occupied by our tactile ex¬
ploration or modulates the movement of our hand. The style of these
modulations particularizes so many modes of appearance of the
tactile phenomenon, which are not reducible to each other and can¬
not be deduced from an elementary tactile sensation. There are
‘surface tactile phenomena’ (Oberflachentastungen) in which a two-
dimensional tactile object is presented to the touch and more or less
firmly resists penetration, three-dimensional tactile environments,
comparable to areas of colour, for example a flow of air or water
which we allow to run over our hand— and there is also tactile

1 See Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt , p. 58. 2 Ibid., p. 62.

3 Ibid., p. 20. 4 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 58.

315

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

transparency (Durchtastete Flachen). Dampness, oiliness and sticki¬
ness belong to a more complex layer of structures.1 On touching a
piece of carved wood, we immediately distinguish the grain of the
wood, which is its natural structure, from the artificial structure
which has been conferred upon it by the wood carver, just as the ear
picks out a note from a set of noises.2 There are here various struc¬
tures of the exploratory movement, and the corresponding pheno¬
mena cannot be treated as a collection of elementary tactile impres¬
sions, since the alleged component impressions are not even given to
the subject: if I touch a piece of linen material or a brush, between
the bristles of the brush and the tlireads of the linen, there does not
lie a tactile nothingness, but a tactile space devoid of matter, a tactile
background.3 Not being really disscctable, the complex tactile pheno¬
menon is, for the same reasons, not theoretically so either, and if we
tried to define hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness, sand
or honey as so many laws or rules governing the development of
tactile experience, it would still be necessary to include in the latter
knowledge of the elements which the law co-ordinates. The person
who touches and who recognizes the rough and the smooth does not
posit either their elements or the relations between those elements,
nor does he think of them in any thoroughgoing way. Tt is not con¬
sciousness which touches or feels, but the hand T and’ the hand is, as
Kant says, ‘an outer brain of man’.4 In visual experience, which
pushes objectification further than does tactile experience, we can, at
least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute the worid, be¬
cause it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a distance,
and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere and
being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the other hand, ad¬
heres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold it hefore us, and it
never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject of
touch, I cannot flatter myself that 1 am everywhere and nowhere; I
cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that 1 go to the
world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred
in me. It is not I who touch, it is my body; when I touch I do not
think of diversity, but my hands rediscover a certain style which is
part of their motor potentiality, and this is what we mean when we
speak of a perceptual field. I am able to touch effectively only if the
phenomenon finds an echo within me, if it accords with a certain
nature of my consciousness, and if the organ which goes out to meet
it is synchronized with it. The unity and identity of the tactile
phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition

1 Cf. Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, pp. 24-35.

s Ibid., pp. 38-9. * Ibid., p, 42.

4 Quoted without reference by Katz, ibid., p. 4.

316

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the
body as a synergic totality. ‘On the day the child uses its hand as a
unique instrument of prehension, it becomes equally a unique instru¬
ment of touch’.1 Not only do I use my fingers and my whole body as a
single organ, but also, thanks to this unity of the body, the tactile
perceptions gained through an organ are immediately translated into
the language of the rest; for example, the contact of our back or chest
with linen or wool remains in the memory in the form of a manual
contact,2 and it may be said in more general terms that we can, in
recollection, touch an object with parts of our body which have never
actually been in contact with it.3 Each contact of an object with part
of our objective body is, therefore, in reality a contact with the whole
of the present or possible phenomenal body. That is how the con¬
stancy of a tactile object may come about through its various mani¬
festations. It is a constancy-for-my-body, an invariant of its total
behaviour. The body is borne towards tactile experience by all its
surfaces and all its organs simultaneously, and carries with it a certain
typical structure of the tactile ‘world’.

We are now in a position to approach the analysis of the thing as
an inter-sensory entity. The thing as presented to sight (the moon’s
pale disc) or to touch (my skull as I can feel it when I touch it), and
which stays the same for us through a series of experiences, is neither
a quale genuinely subsisting, nor the notion or consciousness of such
an objective property, but what is discovered or taken up by our gaze
or our movement, a question to which these things provide a fully
appropriate reply. The object which presents itself to the gaze or the
touch arouses a certain motor intention which aims not at the move¬
ments of one’s own body, but at the thing itself from which they are,
as it were, suspended. And in so far as my hand knows hardness and
softness, and my gaze knows the moon’s light, it is as a certain way of
linking up with the phenomenon and communicating with it. Hard¬
ness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sun¬
light, present themselves in our recollection, not pre-eminently as
sensory contents, but as certain kinds of symbiosis, certain ways the
outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meeting this
invasion, and memory here merely frees the framework of the per¬
ception from the place where it originates. If the constants of each
sense are thus understood, the question of defining the inter-sensory
thing into which they unite as a collection of stable attributes or as
the notion of this collection, will not arise. The sensory ‘properties’ of
a thing together constitute one and the same thing, just as my gaze,

1 Cf. Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, p. 160.

2 Ibid. p. 46. 3 Ibid., ps 51.

317

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

my touch and all my other senses are together the powers of one and
the same body integrated into one and the same action. The surface
which I am about to recognize as the surface of the table, when
vaguely looked at, already summons me to focus upon it, and de¬
mands those movements of convergence which will endow it with its
‘true’ aspect. Similarly any object presented to one sense calls upon
itself the concordant operation of all the others. I see a surface colour
because I have a visual field, and because the arrangement of the field
leads my gaze to that surface — I perceive a thing because I have a
field of existence and because each phenomenon, on its appearance,
attracts towards that field the whole of my body as a system of per¬
ceptual powers. I run through appearances and reach the real colour
or the real shape when my experience is at its maximum of clarity, in
spite of the fact that Berkeley may retort that a fly would see the same
object differently or that a stronger microscope would transform it:
these different appearances are for me appearances of a certain true
spectacle, that in which the perceived configuration, for a sufficient
degree of clarity, reaches its maximum richness.1 1 have visual objects
because I have a visual field in which richness and clarity are in in¬
verse proportion to each other, and because these two demands, either
of which taken separately might be earned to infinity, when brought
together, produce a certain culmination and optimum balance in the
perceptual process. In the same way, what I call experience of the
thing or of reality — not merely of a reality-for-sight or for-touch, but
of an absolute reality — is my full co-existence with the phenomenon,
at the moment when it is in every way at its maximum articulation,
and the ‘data of the different senses’ are directed towards this one
pole, as my ‘aims’ as I look through a microscope vacillate about one
predominant ‘target’. I do not propose to bestow the term ‘visual
thing’ upon a phenomenon which, like areas of colour, presents no
maximum visibility through the various experiences which I have of
it, or which, like the sky, remote and thin on the horizon, unlocalized
and diffuse at the zenith, allows itself to be contaminated by the
structures closest to it without setting over against them any con¬
figuration of its own. If a phenomenon— for exam (lie, a reflection or a
light gust of wind — strikes only one of my senses, it is a mere phan¬
tom, and it will come near to real existence only if, by some chance,
it becomes capable of speaking to my other senses, as does the wind
when, for example, it blows strongly and can be seen in the tumult it
causes in the surrounding countryside. Cdzanne declared that a
picture contains within itself even the smell of the landscape.8 He
meant that the arrangement of colour on the thing (and in the work of

1 Schapp, Beilrage zur Phanomenologie der Wahrnehmung, pp. 59 and ff.

1 J. Gasquet, Cezanne, p. 81.

318

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

art, if it catches the thing in its entirety) signifies by itself all the
responses which would be elicited through an examination by the re¬
maining senses; that a thing would not have this colour had it not
also this shape, these tactile properties, this resonance, this odour,
and that the thing is the absolute fullness which my undivided
existence projects before itself. The unity of the thing beyond all its
fixed properties is not a substratum, a vacant X, an inherent subject,
but that unique accent which is to be found in each one of them, that
unique manner of existing of which they are a second order expres¬
sion. For example, the brittleness, hardness, transparency and
crystal ring of a glass all translate a single manner of being. If a sick
man sees the devil, he sees at the same time his smell, his flames and
smoke, because the significant unity ‘devil5 is precisely that acrid,
fire-and-brimstone essence. There is a symbolism in the thing which
links each sensible quality to the rest. Heat enters experience as a kind
of vibration of the thing; with colour on the other hand it is as if the
thing is thrust outside itself, and it is a priori necessary that an ex¬
tremely hot object should redden, for it is its excess of vibration
which causes it to blaze forth.1 The passing of the sense-data before
our eyes or under our hands is, as it were, a language which teaches
itself, and in which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of
the signs, and this is why it can literally be said that our senses
question things and that things reply to them. ‘The sensible appear¬
ance is what reveals ( Kundgibt ), and expresses as such what it is not
itself’.2 We understand the thing as we understand a new kind of
behaviour, not, that is, through any intellectual operation of sub¬
sumption, but by taking up on our own account the mode of existence
which the observable signs adumbrate before us. A form of behaviour
outlines a certain manner of treating the world. In the same way, in
the interaction of things, each one is characterized by a kind of a
priori to which it remains faithful in all its encounters with the outside
world. The significance of a thing inhabits that thing as the soul in¬
habits the body: it is not behind appearances. The significance of the
ash-tray (at least its total and individual significance, as this is given
in perception) is not a certain idea of the ash-tray which co-ordinates
its sensory aspects and is accessible to the understanding alone, it

1 This unity of the sensory experiences rests on their integration in a single life
of which they thus become the visible witness and emblem. The perceived world
is not only a system of symbols of each sense in terms of the other senses, but also
a set of symbols of human life, as is proved by the ‘flames’ of passion, the ‘light’
of the spirit and so many other metaphors and myths. H. Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie , p. 302.

2 H. Conrad-Martius, ibid., p. 196. The same author ( Zur Ontologie und
Erscheinungslehre der realen Aussenwelt) speaks of a Selbstkundgabe of the
object (p. 371).

319

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

animates the ash-tray, and is self-evidently embodied in it. That is
why we say that in perception the thing is given to us ‘in person’, or
*in the flesh’. Prior to and independently of other people, the thing
achieves that miracle of expression: an inner reality which reveals
itself externally, a significance which descends into the world and
begins its existence there, and which can be fully understood only
when the eyes seek it in its own location. Thus the thing is correlative
to my body and, in more general terms, to my existence, of which my
body is merely the stabilized structure. It is constituted in the hold
which my body takes upon it; it is not first of al 1 a meaning for the
understanding, but a structure accessible to inspection by the body,
and if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual ex¬
perience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates.

The relations between things or aspects of things having always our
body as their vehicle, the whole of nature is the setting of our own
life, or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue. That is why in the last
analysis we cannot conceive anything which is not perceived or per¬
ceptible. As Berkeley says, even an unexplored desert has at least one
person to observe it, namely myself when I think of it, that is, when I
perceive it in purely mental experience. The thing is inseparable from

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articulations are those of our very existence, and because it stands at
the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration
which invests it with humanity. To this extent, every perception is a
communication or a communion, the taking up or completion by us
of some extraneous intention or, on the other hand, the complete
expression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition,
so to speak, of our body with things. The fact that this may not have
been realized earlier is explained by the fact that any coming to
awareness of the perceptual world was hampered by the prejudices
arising from objective thinking. The function of the latter is to reduce
all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world,
putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the
subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite
the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to
make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance
which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because
these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are
less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather
than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are
concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing sur¬
vives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain at¬
mosphere. We are not ‘a collection of eyes, ears and organs of touch

with their cerebral projections _ Just as all literary works ... are

320

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

only particular cases of the possible permutations of the sounds
which make up language and of their literal signs, so qualities or
sensations represent the elements from which the great poetry of our
world ( Umwelt ) is made up. But just as surely as someone knowing
only sounds and letters would have no understanding of literature,
and would miss not only its ultimate nature but everything about it,
so the world is not given and things are not accessible to the person to
whom “sensations” are the world’s data’.1 The perceived is not
necessarily an object present before me as a piece of knowledge to be
acquired, it may be a ‘unity of value’ which is present to me only
practically. If a picture has been removed from a living room, we may
perceive that a change has taken place without being able to say what.
I perceive everything that is part of my environment, and my en¬
vironment includes ‘everything of which the existence or non¬
existence, the nature or modification counts in practice for me’ :2 the
storm which has not yet broken, whose signs I could not even list and
which I cannot even forecast, but for which I am ‘worked up’ and
prepared — the periphery of the visual field which the hysterical sub¬
ject does not expressly grasp, but which nevertheless co-determines
his movements and orientation — the respect of other men, or that
loyal friendship which I take for granted, but which are none the less
there for me, since they leave me morally speaking in mid-air when I
am deprived of them.3 Love is in the flowers prepared by Felix de
Vandenesse for Madame de Mortsauf, just as unmistakeably as in a
caress : ‘I thought that the colours and the foliage had a harmony and
a poetry which emerges into the understanding by delighting the gaze,
just as musical phrases awaken countless memories in hearts that love
and are loved. If colour is organized light, must it not have a meaning,
as different combinations of air have theirs. . . Love has its heraldry
and the countess secretly deciphered it. She gave me one of those
sharp looks that seem like the cry of a sick man touched on his
wound: she was both embarrassed and delighted.’ The flowers are
self-evidently a love bouquet, and yet it is impossible to say what in
them signifies love, and that is even the reason why Mme de Mortsauf
can accept them without breaking her vows. There is no way of
understanding them other than by looking at them, but to the be¬
holder they say what they mean. Their significance is the track of an
existence, legible and comprehensible for another existence. Natural
perception is not a science, it does not posit the things with which
science deals, it does not hold them at arm’s length in order to ob¬
serve them, but lives with them; it is the ‘opinion’ or the ‘primary
faith’ which binds us to a world as to our native land, and the being of

1 Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, pp. 149-51.

2 Ibid., p. 140. 8 Ibid.

321

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

what is perceived is the antepredicative being towards which our
whole existence is magnetically attracted.

However, we have not exhausted the meaning of ‘the thing’ by
defining it as the correlative of our body and our life. After all, we
grasp the unity of our body only in that of the thing, and it is by taking
things as our starting point that our hands, eyes and all our sense-
organs appear to us as so many interchangeable instruments. The
body by itself, the body at rest is merely an obscure mass, and we per¬
ceive it as a precise and identifiable being when it moves towards a
thing, and in so far as it is intentionally projected outwards, and even
then this perception is never more than incidental and marginal to
consciousness, the centre of which is occupied with things and the
world. One cannot, as we have said, conceive any perceived thing
without someone to perceive it. But the fact remains that the thing
presents itself to the person who perceives it as a thing in itself, and
thus poses the problem of a genuine in-itself-for-us. Ordinarily we do
not notice this because our perception, in the context of our everyday
concerns, alights on things sufficiently attentively to discover in them
their familiar presence, but not sufficiently so to disclose the non¬
human element which lies hidden in them. But the thing holds itself
aloof from us and remains self-sufficient. This will become clear if we
suspend our ordinary preoccupations and pay a metaphysical and
disinterested attention to it. It is then hostile and alien, no longer an
interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other, a Self which evades us no
less than does intimacy with an outside consciousness. The thing and
the world, we have already said, are offered to perceptual com¬
munication as is a familiar face with an expression which is im¬
mediately understood. But then a face expresses something only
through the arrangements of the colours and lights which make it up,
the meaning of the gaze being not behind the eyes, but in them, and a
touch of colour more or less is all the painter needs in order to
transform the facial expression of a portrait. In the work of his earlier
years, Cezanne tried to paint the expression first and foremost, and
that is why he never caught it. He gradually learned that expression is
the language of the thing itself and springs from its configuration.
His painting is an attempt to recapture the physiognomy of things
and faces by the integral reproduction of their sensible configuration.
This is what nature constantly and effortlessly achieves, and it is why
the paintings of Cezanne are ‘those of a pre-world in which as yet no
men existed'.1 The thing appeared to us above as the goal of a bodily
teleology, the norm of our psycho-physiological setting. But that was
merely a psychological definition which does not make the full

1 F, Novotny, Das Problem des Menschcn Ctfzamw im Vcrhahnis zu Seiner
Kunst , p. 275.

322

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

meaning of the thing defined explicit, and which reduces the thing to
those experiences in which we encounter it. We now discover the core
of reality: a thing is a thing because, whatever it imparts to us, is
imparted through the very organization of its sensible aspects. The
‘real’ is that environment in which each moment is not only in¬
separable from the rest, but in some way synonymous with them, in
which the ‘aspects’ are mutually significatory and absolutely equiva¬
lent. This is perfect fulness : it is impossible completely to describe the
colour of the carpet without saying that it is a carpet, made of wool,
and without implying in this colour a certain tactile value, a certain
weight and a certain resistance to sound. The thing is an entity of a
kind such that the complete definition of one of its attributes demands
that of the subject in its entirety: an entity, consequently, the sig¬
nificance of which is indistinguishable from its total appearance.
Cezanne again said: ‘The outline and the colour are no longer
distinct; in proportion as one paints, one outlines, and the more the
colour is harmonized, the more definite the outline becomes . . .
when the colour is at its richest, the form is at its most complete’.1
With the structure lighting-lighted, background and foreground are
possible. With the appearance of the thing, there can at last be uni¬
vocal forms and positions. The system of appearances, the pre-
spatial fields acquire an anchorage and ultimately become a space.
But it is not the case that geometrical features alone are merged with
colour. The very significance of the thing is built up before our eyes,
a significance which no verbal analysis can exhaust, and which merges
with the exhibiting of the thing in its self-evidence. Every touch of
colour applied by Cezanne must, as E. Bernard says, ‘contain the
atmosphere, the light, the object, the relief, the character, the outline
and the style’.2 Each fragment of a visible spectacle satisfies an in¬
finite number of conditions, and it is of the nature of the real to
compress into each of its instants an infinity of relations. Like the
thing, the picture has to be seen and not defined, nevertheless, though
it is a small world which reveals itself within the larger one, it cannot
lay claim to the same substantiality. We feel that it is put together by
design, that in it significance precedes existence and clothes itself in
only the minimum of matter necessary for its communication. The
miracle of the real world, on the other hand, is that in it significance
and existence are one, and that we see the latter lodge itself in no un¬
certain fashion in the former. In the realm of imagination, I have no
sooner formed the intention of seeing than I already believe that I
have seen. The imaginary has no depth, and does not respond to our
efforts to vary our points of view; it does not lend itself to our

1 Gasquet, Cezanne, p. 123.

2 E. Bernard, La Mithode de Cezanne , p. 298.

323

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

observation.1 We never have a hold upon it. In every perception, on
the other hand, it is the material itself which assumes significance and
form. If I wait for someone at a door in a poorly lit street, each person
who comes out has an indistinct appearance. Someone is coming out,
and I do not yet know whether I can recognize him as the person I am
waiting for. The familiar figure will emerge from this nebulous back¬
ground as the earth does from a ground mist. The real is distinguish¬
able from our fictions because in reality the significance encircles and
permeates matter. Once a picture is torn up, we have in our hands
nothing but pieces of daubed canvas. But if we break up a stone and
then further break up the fragments, the pieces remaining are still
pieces of stone. The real lends itself to unending exploration; it is in¬
exhaustible. This is why objects belonging to man, tools, seem to be
placed on the world, whereas things are rooted in a background of
nature which is alien to man. For our human existence, the thing is
much less a pole which attracts than one which repels. We do not
begin by knowing the perspective aspects of the thing; it is not
mediated by our senses, our sensations or our perspectives; we go
straight to it, and it is only in a secondary way that we become aware
of the limits of our knowledge and of ourselves as knowing. Here is a
die: let us consider it as it is presented, in the natural attitude, to a
subject who has never wondered about perception, and who lives
among things. The die is there, lying in the world. When the subject
moves round it, there appear, not signs , but sides of the die. He does
not perceive projections or even profiles of the die, but he sees the die
itself at one time from this side, at another from that, and those
appearances which are not yet firmly fixed intercommunicate, run
into each other, and all radiate from a central WUrfelhaftiglceit2
which is the mystical link between them.

A set of reductions makes its appearance from the moment we take
the perceiving subject into account. In the first place I notice that this
die is for me only. Perhaps after all people nearby do not see it, and
this alone deprives it of some element of its reality; it ceases to be in
itself in order to become the pole of a personal history. Then I ob¬
serve that the die is, strictly speaking, presented to me only through
sight, and immediately I am left with nothing but the outer surface of
the whole die; it loses its materiality, empties itself, and is reduced to
a visual structure of form, colour, light and shade. But the form,
colour, light and shade are not in a void, for they still retain a point
of support, namely the visual thing. Furthermore the visual thing has
still a spatial structure which endows its qualitative properties with a
particular value: if I learn that the die is merely an illusory one, its

1 J. P. Sartre, UImaginaire> p. 19.

2 Scheler, Der Formal ismus in cfer Ethik , p. 52.

324

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

colour changes straight away, and it no longer has the same manner
of modulating space. All the spatial relations to be found in the die
and which are capable of being made explicit, for example the dis¬
tance from its nearer to its farther face, the ‘real’ size of the angles,
the ‘real’ direction of its sides, are indivisible in its being as a visible
die. It is by way of a third reduction that we pass from the visual
thing to the perspective aspect: I observe that the faces of the die
cannot all fall beneath my gaze, and that certain of them undergo
distortions. Through a final reduction, I arrive ultimately at the
sensation which is no longer a property of the thing, or even of the
perspective aspect, but a modification of my body.1 The experience of
the thing does not go through all these mediations, and consequently
the thing is not presented to a mind which seizes each constituent
layer as representative of a higher layer, building it up from start to
finish. It exists primarily in its self-evidence, and any attempt to
define the thing either as a pole of my bodily life, or as a permanent
possibility of sensations, or as a synthesis of appearances, puts in
place of the thing itself in its primordial being an imperfect recon¬
struction of the thing with the aid of bits and pieces of subjective
provenance. How are we to understand both that the thing is the
correlative of my knowing body, and that it rejects that body?

What is given is not the thing on its own, but the experience of the
thing, or something transcendent standing in the wake of one’s sub¬
jectivity, some kind of natural entity of which a glimpse is afforded
through a personal history. If one tried, according to the realistic
approach, to make perception into some coincidence with the thing,
it would no longer be possible to understand what the perceptual
event was, how the subject managed to assimilate the thing, how after
coinciding with the thing he was able to consign it to his own history,
since ex hypothesi he would have nothing of it in his possession. In
order to perceive things, we need to live them. Yet we reject the
idealism involved in the synthetic view, because it too distorts our
lived-through relationship to things. In so far as the perceiving sub¬
ject synthesizes the percept, he has to dominate and grasp in thought
a material of perception, to organize and himself link together, from
the inside, all the aspects of the thing, which means that perception
ceases to be inherent in an individual subject and a point of view, and
that the thing loses its transcendence and opacity. To ‘live’ a thing is
not to coincide with it, nor fully to embrace it in thought. Our
problem, therefore, becomes clear. The perceiving subject must,
without relinquishing his place and his point of view, and in the
opacity of sensation, reach out towards things to which he has, in
advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself
1 Scheler, Der Formalismus in dir Ethik, pp. 51-4.

325

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

the project, and open himself to an absolute Other which he is making
ready in the depths of his being. The thing is not all of a piece, for
though the perspective aspects, and the ever-changing flow of appear¬
ances, are not explicitly posited, all are at least ready to be perceived
and given in non-positing consciousness, to precisely the extent
necessary for me to be able to escape from them into the thing.
When I perceive a pebble, I am not expressly conscious of knowing it
only through my eyes, of enjoying only certain perspective aspects of
it, and yet an analysis in these terms, if I undertake it, does not sur¬
prise me. Beforehand I knew obscurely that my gaze was the medium
and instrument of comprehensive perception, and the pebble ap¬
peared to me in the full light of day in opposition to the concentrated
darkness of my bodily organs. I can imagine possible fissures in the
solid mass of the thing if I take it into my head to close one eye or to
think of the perspective. It is in this way that it is true to say that the
thing is the outcome of a flow of subjective appearances. And yet I
did not actually constitute it, in the sense that I did not actively and
through a process of mental inspection posit the interrelations of the
many aspects presented to the senses, and the relations of all of them
to my different kinds of sensory apparatus. We have expressed this by

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my gaze, following the indications offered by the spectacle, and draw¬
ing together the light and shade spread over it, ultimately settles on the
lighted surface as upon that which the light reveals. My gaze ‘knows’
the significance of a certain patch of light in a certain context; it
understands the logic of lighting. Expressed in more general terms,
there is a logic of the world to which my body in its entirety con¬
forms, and through which things of intersensory significance become
possible for us. In so far as it is capable of synergy, my body knows
the significance, for the totality of my experience, of this or that
colour added or subtracted, and the occurrence of any such change
is immediately picked out from the object’s presentation and general
significance. To have senses, sight for example, is to possess that
general setting, that framework of potential, visual type-relations
with the help of which we are able to take up any given visual
grouping. To have a body is to possess a universal setting, a schema
of all types of perceptual unfolding and of all those inter-sensory
correspondences which lie beyond the segment of tire world which we
are actually perceiving. A thing is, therefore, not actually given in
perception, it is internally taken up by us, reconstituted and ex¬
perienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world, the basic
structures of which we carry with us, and of which it is merely one of
many possible concrete forms. Although a pari: of our living ex¬
perience, it is nevertheless transcendent in relation to our life because

326

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

the human body, with its habits which weave round it a human en¬
vironment, has running through it a movement towards the world
itself. Animal behaviour aims at an animal setting (Umwelt) and
centres of resistance {Wider stand). If we try to subject it to natural
stimuli devoid of concrete significance, we produce neuroses.1
Human behaviour opens upon a world {Welt) and upon an object
(Gegenstanel) beyond the tools which it makes for itself, and one may
even treat one’s own body as an object. Human life is defined in
terms of this power which it has of denying itself in objective thought,
a power which stems from its primordial attachment to the world
itself. Human life ‘understands’ not only a certain definite environ¬
ment, but an infinite number of possible environments, and it under¬
stands itself because it is thrown into a natural world.

What needs to be elucidated, then, is this primary comprehension
of the world. The natural world, we said, is the schema of inter-
sensory type-relations. We do not, following Kant, understand there¬
by a system of invariable relations to which every existent thing is
subject in so far as it can be known. It is not like a crystal cube, all
the aspects of which can be conceived in virtue of its geometrical
structure, and which even reveals its hidden sides, since it is trans¬
parent. The world has its unity, although the mind may not have
succeeded in inter-relating its facets and in integrating them into the
conception of a flat projection. This unity is comparable with that of
an individual whom I recognize because he is recognizable in an un-
challcngeably self-evident way, before I ever succeed in stating the
formula governing his character, because he retains the same style in
everything he says and does, even though he may change his place or
his opinions. A style is a certain manner of dealing with situations,
which I identify or understand in an individual or in a writer, by
taking over that manner myself in a sort of imitative way, even
though I may be quite unable to define it; and in any case a definition,
correct though it may be, never provides an exact equivalent, and is
never of interest to any but those who have already had the actual
experience. I experience the unity of the world as I recognize a style.
Yet even so the style of a person, or of a town, does not remain
constant for me. After ten years of friendship, even independently of
any changes brought about by age, I seem to be dealing with a
different person, and after ten years of living in a district, it is as iff
were in a different one. Yet it is only the knowledge of things which
varies. Though almost unnoticed at first glance, it is transformed by
the unfolding of perception. The world remains the same world
throughout my life, because it is that permanent being within which I
1 See La Structure du Comportement, pp. 72 and ff.

327

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

make all corrections to my knowledge, a world which in its unity
remains unaffected by those corrections, and the self-evidence of
which attracts my activity towards the truth through appearance and
error. It is marginal to the child’s first perception as a presence as yet
unrecognized but incontrovertible, which knowledge will subse¬
quently make determinate and complete. I may be mistaken, and
need to rearrange my certainties, and reject the being to which my
illusions give rise, but I do not for a moment doubt that in them¬
selves things have been compatible and compossible, because from
the very start I am in communication with one being, and one only, a
vast individual from which my own experiences are taken, and which
persists on the horizon of my life as the distant roar of a great city
provides the background to everything we do in it. It is said that
sounds or colours belong to a sensory field, because sounds once
perceived can be followed only by other sounds, or by silence, which
is not an auditory nothingness, but the absence of sounds, and which,
therefore, keeps us in contact with the being of sound. If, during the
process of reflection, I cease to hear sounds, and then suddenly be¬
come receptive to them again, they appear to me to be already there,
and I pick up a thread which I had dropped but which is unbroken.
The field is a setting that I possess for a certain type of experiences,
and which, once established, cannot be nullified. Our possession of
the world is similar to this, except that it is possible to conceive a
subject with no auditory field, but impossible to conceive a subject
with no world.1 Just as, in the hearing subject, the absence of sounds
does not cut bff all communication with the world of sounds, so in
the case of a subject deaf and blind from birth, the absence of the
visual and auditory worlds does not sever all communication with
the world in general. There is always something confronting him, a
being to be deciphered, an omnitudo real it at is, and the foundation of
this possibility is permanently laid by the first sensory experience,
however narrow or imperfect it may be. We have no other way of
knowing what the world is than by actively accepting this affirmation
which is made every instant within us; for any definition_of-the-
world would be merely a summary and schematic outline, conveying
nothing to us, if we did not already have access to the determinate, if
we did not in fact know it by virtue of the mere fact that we are. It is
upon our experience of the world that all our logical operations con¬
cerned with significance must be based, and the world itself, there¬
fore, is not a certain significance common to all our experiences
which we discern in them, some idea which breathes life into the
matter of knowledge. The world does not hold for us a set of outlines

1 E. Stein, Beitriige zur phattomenologischen Begriindung der Psychology und der
Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 10 and ff.

328

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

which some consciousness within us binds together into a unity. It is
true that the world presents itself as outlines, in the first place
spatially; here I can see only the south side of the street, whereas if I
crossed over, I should see the north side; also I sec nothing but Paris,
and the countryside which I havejust left behind me has relapsed into
a kind of latent life. When we go further into it, spatial outlines are
also temporal: elsewhere is always something we have seen or might
see; and even if I do perceive it as simultaneous with the present, this
is because it is part of the same wave of duration. The town to which
I am drawing nearer, changes its aspects, as I realize when I turn my
eyes away for a moment and then look back at it. But the outlines do
not follow each other or stand side by side in front of me. My ex¬
perience at these different stages is bound up with itself in such a way
that I do not get different perspective views linked to each other
through the conception of an invariant. The perceiving body does not
successively occupy different points of view beneath the gaze of some
unlocated consciousness which is thinking about them. For it is re¬
flection which objectifies points of view or perspectives, whereas
when I perceive, 1 belong, through my point of view, to the world as a
whole, nor am I even aware of the limits of my visual field. The
variety of points of view is hinted at only by an imperceptible shift, a
certain ‘blurred’ effect in the appearance. If the successive outlines
are really distinguished from each other, as in the case of my driving
towards a town and looking at it only intermittently, there is no
longer a perception of the town, for 1 find myself suddenly con¬
fronted by another object having no common measure with its pre¬
decessor. 1 finally pass the judgement: 'It is Chartres’, and weld the
two appearances together, but I am able to do so because they are
both extracted from one and the same perception of the world, which
consequently cannot admit of the same discontinuity. We can no
more construct perception of the thing and of the world from discrete
aspects, than we can make up the binocular vision of an object from
two monocular images. My experiences of the world are integrated
into one single world as the double image merges into the one thing,
when my finger stops pressing upon my eyeball. I do not have one
perspective, then another, and between them a link brought about by
the understanding, but each perspective merges inio the other and, in
so far as it is still possible to speak of a synthesis, we are concerned
with a ‘transitional synthesis’. It is particularly true that my present
vision is not restricted to what my visual field actually presents to me,
for the next room, the landscape behind that hill and the inside or the
back of that object are not recalled or represented. My point of view
is for me not so much a limitation of my experience as a way I have of
infiltrating into the world in its entirety, When I see the horizon, it

329

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

does not make me think of that other landscape which I should see if
I were standing on it, nor does that other landscape make me think
of a third one and so on; I do not visualize anything; all these land¬
scapes are already there in the harmonious sequence and infinite un¬
folding of their perspectives. When I see the bright green of one of
Cezanne’s vases, it does not make me think of pottery, it presents it
to me. The pottery is there, with its thin, smooth outer surface and its
porous inside, in the particular way in which the green varies in shade.
In the inner and outer horizon of the thing or the landscape, there is
a co-presence and co-existence of outlines which is brought into
existence through space and time. The natural world is the horizon of
all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my
experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions
of my personal and historical life. Its counterpart within me is the
given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory functions in
which we have discovered the definition of the body.

But how is it possible for me to experience the world as a positively
existing individual, since none of the perspective views of it which I
enjoy exhausts it, since its horizons are always open, and since more¬
over no knowledge, even scientific knowledge, provides us with the
invariable formula of a facies totius universil How can any thing
every really and truly present itself to us, since its synthesis is never a
completed process, and since I can always expect to see it break down
and fall to the status of a mere illusion? Yet there is something and
not nothing. There is a determinate reality, at least at a certain degree
of relativity. Even if in the last resort I have no absolute knowledge of
this stone, and even if my knowledge regarding it takes me step by
step along an infinite road and cannot ever be complete, the fact
remains that the perceived stone is there, that I recognize it, that I
have named it and that we agree on a certain number of statements
about it. Thus it seems that we are led to a contradiction: belief in
the thing and the world must entail the presumption of a completed
synthesis — and yet this completion is made impossible by the very
nature of the perspectives which have to be inter-related, since each
one of them, by virtue of its horizons, refers to other perspectives, and

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operate within being, but the contradiction disappears, or rather is
generalized, being linked up with the ultimate conditions of our ex¬
perience and becoming one with the possibility of lining and thinking,
if we operate in time, and if we manage to understand time as the
measure of being. The synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal
process, which means, not that it is subject to time, nor that it is
passive in relation to time, nor that it has to prevail over time, but
that it merges with the very movement whereby time passes. Through

330

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

my perceptual field, with its spatial horizons, I am present to my
surrounding, I co-exist with all the other landscapes which stretch out
beyond it, and all these perspectives together form a single temporal
wave, one of the world’s instants. Through my perceptual field with
its temporal horizons I am present to my present, to all the preceding
past and to a future. And, at the same time, this ubiquity is not
strictly real, but is clearly only intentional. Although the landscape
before my eyes may well herald the features of the one which is
hidden behind the hill, it does so only subject to a certain degree of
indeterminacy: here there are meadows, over there perhaps woods,
and, in any case, beyond the near horizon, I know only that there will
be land or sea, beyond that either open sea or frozen sea, beyond that
again either earth or sky and, as far as the limits of the earth’s at¬
mosphere are concerned, I know only that there is, in the most
general terms, something to be perceived, and of those remote
regions I possess only the style, in the abstract. In the same way,
although each past is progressively enclosed in its entirety in the
more recent past which has followed it, in virtue of the interlocking
of intentionalities, the past degenerates, and the earliest years of my
life are lost in the general existence of my body, of which I now know
merely that it was already, at that time, confronted by colours and
sounds, and a nature similar to the one which I now see before me.
I possess the remote past, as I do the future, therefore, only in
principle, and my life is slipping away from me on all sides and is
circumscribed by impersonal zones. The contradiction which we find
between the reality of the world and its incompleteness is the con¬
tradiction between the omnipresence of consciousness and its in¬
volvement in a field of presence. But let us look more closely to see
whether in fact we have here a contradiction and a dilemma. Though
I may say that I am enclosed in my present, since after all we pass, by
imperceptible transitions, from the present to the past, from the
recent to the remote, and since it is impossible to separate strictly the
present from what is merely presented in actuality, the transcendence
of remote experiences encroaches upon my present and brings a
suspicion of unreality even into those which I believe to be coincident
with my present self. Though I am here and now, yet I am not here
and now. In so far, on the other hand, as I consider my intentional
relationships with the past and the ‘elsewhere’ as constitutive of the
past and the elsewhere, and in so far as I try to free consciousness
from any localization and temporal abode, in so far as I am every¬
where where my perception and memory lead me, I cannot live in
any time, and thus, along with the uniquely compelling reality which
defines my present here and now, vanishes the reality of my former or
my possible presents. If the synthesis could be genuine and my
z 331

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

experience formed a closed system, if the thing and the world could
be defined once and for all, if the spatio-temporal horizons could,
even theoretically, be made explicit and the world conceived from no
point of view, then nothing would exist; I should hover above the
world, so that all times and places, far from becoming simultaneously
real, would become unreal, because l should live in none of them and
would be involved nowhere. If I am at all times and everywhere, then
I am at no time and nowhere. Thus no choice is offered between the
incompleteness of the world and its existence, between the particular
involvement and omnipresence of consciousness, between transcend¬
ence and immanence, since each of these terms when pronounced
singly brings to mind its opposite. What needs to be understood is
that for the same reason I am present here and now, and present else¬
where and always, and also absent from here and from now, and
absent from every place and from every time. This ambiguity is not
some imperfection of consciousness or existence, but the definition
of them. Time in the widest sense, that is, the order of co-existences
as well as that of successions, is a setting to which one can gain
access and which one can understand only by occupying a situation
in it, and by grasping it in its entirety through the horizons of that
situation. The world, which is the nucleus of time, subsists only by
virtue of that unique action which both separates and brings together
the actually presented and the present; and consciousness, which is
taken to be the seat of clear thinking, is on the contrary the very
abode of ambiguity. Under these circumstances one may say, if one
wishes, that nothing exists absolutely, and it would, indeed, be more
accurate to say that nothing exists and that everything is ‘temporal-
ized’. But temporality is not some half-hearted existence. Objective
being is not plenary existence. The model is provided for us by these
things in front of us which at first glance seem entirely determinate:
this stone is white, hard and cool, and it seems that the world is
crystallized in it, that it has no need of time in order to exist, that it
wholly unfolds itself in the instant, and that any additional existence
would involve it in a fresh coming into being, so that we are tempted
to think that the world, if it is anything at all, can be only a collection

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instants. Such are the world and time of Descartes, and it is indeed a
fact that this conception of being is almost inevitably arrived at,
since I have a visual field with circumscribed objects, and a sensible
present, and since every ‘elsewhere’ is given as another here, every
past and every future as a present gone by or still to come. The per¬
ception of one single thing lays for ever the foundation of the ideal of
objective or explicit knowledge which classical logic develops. But as
soon as we concentrate upon these certainties, and as soon as we set

332

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

astir the intentional life which produces them, we become aware
that objective being has its roots in the ambiguities of time. I cannot
conceive the world as a sum of things, nor time as a sum of in¬
stantaneous ‘present moments’, since each thing can offer itself in its
full determinacy only if other things recede into the vagueness of the
remote distance, and each present can take on its reality only by
excluding the simultaneous presence of earlier and later presents, and
since thus a sum of things or of presents makes nonsense. Things and
instants can link up with each other to form a world only through the
medium of that ambiguous being known as a subjectivity, and can
become present to each other only from a certain point of view and in
intention. Objective time which flows and exists part by part would
not be even suspected, were it not enveloped in a historical time which
is projected from the living present towards a past and towards a
future. The alleged plenitude of the object and of the instant springs
forth only in face of the imperfection of the intentional being. A
present without a future, or an eternal present, is precisely the defini¬
tion of death; the living present is torn between a past which it takes
up and a future which it projects. It is thus of the essence of the thing
and of the world to present themselves as ‘open’, to send us beyond
their determinate manifestations, to promise us always ‘something
else to see’. This is what is sometimes expressed by saying that the
thing and the world are mysterious. They are indeed, when we do not
limit ourselves to their objective aspect, but put them back into the
setting of subjectivity. They are even an absolute mystery, not
amenable to elucidation, and this through no provisional gap in our
knowledge, for in that case it would fall back to the status of a mere
problem, but because it is not of the order of objective thought in
which there are solutions. There is nothing to be seen beyond our
horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing
inside the thing but other smaller things. The ideal of objective
thought is both based upon and ruined by temporality. The world, in
the full sense of the word, is not an object, for though it has an en¬
velope of objective and determinate attributes, it has also fissures and
gaps into which subjectivities slip and lodge themselves, or rather
which are those subjectivities themselves. We now understand why
things, which owe their meaning to it, are not meanings presented to
the intelligence, but opaque structures, and why their ultimate
significance remains confused. The thing and the world exist only in
so far as they are experienced by me or by subjects like me, since they
are both the concatenation of our perspectives, yet they transcend all
perspectives because this chain is temporal and incomplete. I have
the impression that the world itself is a living, self-subsistent entity
outside me, just as absent landscapes live on beyond my visual

333

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

field, and as my past was formerly lived on the earlier side of my
present.

Hallucination causes the real to disintegrate before our eyes, and
puts a quasi-reality in its place, and in both these respects this
phenomenon brings us back to the pre-logical bases of our knowledge
and confirms what has been said about the thing and the world. The
all-important point is that the patients, most of the time, discriminate
between their hallucinations and their perceptions. Schizophrenics
who experience tactile hallucinations of pricking or of an ‘electric
current’ jump when they feel an injection of ethyl chloride or a real
electric shock: ‘That time,’ they say to the doctor, ‘you were the
cause of it, because you are going to operate.’ Another schizophrenic,
who said he could see a man standing in the garden under his window,
and pointed to the spot, giving a description of the man’s clothes and
general bearing, was astonished when someone was actually placed in
the garden at the spot in question, wearing the same clothes and in
the same posture. He looked carefully, and exclaimed: ‘Yes, there is
someone there, but it’s somebody else.’ He would not admit to there
being two men in the garden. A patient who has never entertained

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similar ones played to her on the gramophone, interrupts her work,
raises her head without turning round, and sees a white angel appear,
as it does every time she hears her voices, but she does not count this
experience among the day’s ‘voices’ : for this time it is not the same
thing, but a ‘direct’ voice, perhaps the doctor’s. An old woman
afflicted with senile dementia, who complains of finding powder in
her bed, is startled to find in reality a thin layer of toilet powder there :
‘What is this?’ she asks, ‘this powder is damp, the other is dry.’ The
subject who, in delirium tremens, takes the doctor’s hand to be a
guinea pig, is immediately aware of the fact when a real guinea pig is
placed in his other hand.1 The fact that patients so often say that
someone is talking to them by telephone or radio, is to be taken pre¬
cisely as expressing that the morbid world is artificial, and that it
lacks something needed to become a ‘reality’. The voices are uncouth
voices, or else voices ‘of people pretending to be uncouth’, or it may
be a young man imitating an old man’s voice, or ‘as if a German
were trying to talk Yiddish’.2 Tt is as when a person says something to
someone, but without getting as far as uttering any sound.’3 Do not
such admissions put an end to all argument about hallucination?
Since the hallucination is not a sensory content, there seems nothing

1 Zucker, Experimentettes iiber Sinnestauschungen , pp. 706-64.

2 Minkowski, Le problems des hallucinations et le problems de Ve space, p. 66.
8 Schroder, Das Halluzinieren , p. 606.

334

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

for it but to regard it as a judgement, an interpretation or a belief.
But although these patients do not believe in their hallucinations in
the sense in which one believes in perceived objects, an intellectualist
theory of hallucination is equally impossible. Alain quotes Mon¬
taigne’s words on madmen ‘who believe they see what they do not
really see’.1 But in fact the insane do not believe they see , or, when
questioned, they correct their statements on this point. A hallucina¬
tion is not a judgement or a rash belief, for the same reasons which
prevent it from being a sensory content: the judgement or the belief
could consist only in positing the hallucination as true, and this is
precisely what the patients do not do. At the level of judgement they
distinguish hallucination from perception, and in any case argue
against their hallucinations: rats cannot come out of the mouth and
go back into the stomach.2 A doctor who hears voices climbs into a
boat and rows towards the open sea to convince himself that no one
is really talking to him.3 When the hallucinatory attack supervenes,
the rat and the voices are still there .

Why do empiricism and intellectualism fail to understand hallu¬
cination, and by what other method is there some chance of succeed¬
ing? Empiricism tries to explain hallucination in the same way as it
does perception: through the effect of certain physiological causes,
the irritation, for example, of certain nervous centres, sense-data
appear as they appear in perception through the action of physical
stimuli on those same nerve centres. At first sight, there is nothing in
common between these physiological hypotheses and the intellectual¬
ist conception. In fact there is, as we shall see, this much in common
that the two doctrines presuppose the priority of objective thought,
and having at their disposal only one mode of being, namely objec¬
tive being, try to force the phenomenon of hallucination into it. In
this way they misconceive it, and overlook its own mode of certainty
and its immanent significance since, according to the patient him¬
self, hallucination has no place in objective being. For empiricism,
hallucination is an event in the chain of events running from the
stimulus to the state of consciousness. In intellectualism, an effort
is made to get rid of hallucination properly speaking, to construct it,
and to deduce what it might be from a certain idea of consciousness.
The cogito teaches us that the existence of consciousness is indis¬
tinguishable from the consciousness of existing, and that therefore
there can be nothing in it of which it is unaware, and that conversely,
everything that it knows with certainty it finds in itself; that

1 Systime des Beaux- Arts, p. 15.

2 Specht, Zur Phanomenologie und Morphologie der pathologischen Wahmehmr
ungstauschungen , p. 15.

3 Jaspers, Ober Trugwahrnehmungen, p. 471.

335

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

consequently the truth or falsity of an experience must not reside in its
relation to an external reality, but be capable of being read off from
it as intrinsic denominations, without which they could never be
recognized. Thus false perceptions are not genuine perceptions at all.
The victim of hallucinations cannot hear or see in the genuine sense of
these words. He judges and believes that he sees or hears, but he
does not really see or hear. This conclusion does not leave even the
cogito intact, for the question remains how a subject can believe that
he hears when actually he does not. If it be replied that this belief is
simply assertive, that it is knowledge of the first kind, one of those
vague appearances in which one does not believe in the full sense of
the word, and which persist only in the absence of critical scrutiny, in
short a mere de facto state of our knowledge, the question will then
be how a consciousness can be in this state of deficiency without be¬
ing aware of it, or, if it is aware of it, how it can remain in it.1 The
intellectualist cogito leaves in front of itself only a pure cogitatum
which it possesses and constitutes in its entirety. It is a hopeless task
to try to understand how it can be mistaken about an object which
it constitutes. It is therefore the reduction of our experience to so
many objects, the primacy of objective thought, which, here as be¬
fore, causes us to lose sight of the phenomenon of hallucination.

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a fundamental kinship, which is their common ignorance of pheno¬
mena. Both construct the hallucinatory phenomenon instead of liv¬
ing it. Even the novelty and validity in intellectualism — the differ¬
ence of nature which it sets up between perception and hallucination
— is impaired by the priority given to objective thought: if the
hallucinated subject objectively knows or thinks of his hallucination
as being what it is, how is hallucinatory deception possible? All the
difficulties arise from the fact that objective thought, the reduction
of things as experienced to objects, of subjectivity to the cogitatio ,
leaves no room for the equivocal adherence of the subject to pre-
objcctive phenomena. The consequence is therefore clear. We must
stop constructing hallucination, or indeed consciousness generally,
according to a certain essence or idea of itself which compels us to

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decreed development inconceivable. We learn to know conscious¬
ness as we learn to know anything else. When the victim of hallu-

1 Hence Alain’s hesitation : if consciousness always knows itself, it must imme-
diately distinguish the percept from llic figment of imagination, and we shall say
that the imaginary is not visible. (Systime des Beaux- Arts, pp, 15 and ft.) But if
there is hallucinatory deception, then the imaginary must be able to be taken
for the percept, and wc shall say that the judgement entails vision. {Quatre-vingh
nn ckapi f res stir ! 7 esprit at les passions, p. IS.)

336

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

dilations declares that he sees and hears, we must not believe him,1
since he also declares the opposite; what we must do is understand
him. We must not be satisfied with the opinions of sane conscious¬
ness on the subject of hallucinatory consciousness, and regard our¬
selves as sole judges of the distinctive significance of the hallucination.
To which it will doubtless be replied that I have no means of access
to hallucination as it is for itself. The person who mentally experi¬
ences either the hallucination, or another person, or his own past,
never coincides with the hallucination, or with the other person, or
with his past as it was. Knowledge can never overstep this limit of
facticity. This is true, but it must not be used to justify arbitrary
constructions. It is true that we should never talk about anything
if we were limited to talking about those experiences with which we
coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover there is no
experience without speech, as the purely Iived-through has no part
in the discursive life of man. The fact, remains, however, that the
primary meaning of discourse is to be found in that text of experience
which it is trying to communicate. What is being sought is not a
fictitious coincidence of myself and others, of my present self with
its past, of the doctor with the patient; we cannot take over another
person’s situation, relive the past in its reality, or illness as it is lived
through by the patient. The consciousness of others, the past, or
illness, can never be brought down in their existence to what I know
of them. But neither can my own consciousness, in so far as it exists
and is committed, be made to amount simply to what I know of it.
If a philosopher produces hallucinations in himself by means of an
insulin injection, either he yields to the hallucinatory impulse, in
which case the hallucination is a living experience for him and not an
object of knowledge, or else he retains something of his reflective
power, and it will always be possible to challenge his testimony,
which is not that of a deranged person ‘committed’ to his hallucina¬
tion. There is, then, no privileged self-knowledge, and other people
are no more closed systems than I am myself. What is given is not
myself as opposed to others, my present as opposed to my past, sane
consciousness with its cogito as opposed to consciousness afflicted
with hallucinations, the former being sole judge of the latter and
limited, in relation to it, to its internal conjectures — it is the doctor
with the patient, myself with others, my past on the horizon of my
present. When I recall my past at the present time I distort it, but I
can allow for these very distortions, for they are conveyed to me by
the tension created between the extinct past at which 1 am aiming
and iny arbitrary interpretations. I misunderstood another person
because I see him from my own point of view, but then I hear him
1 As Alain accuses the psychologists of doing.

337

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

expostulate, and finally come round to the idea of the other person
as a centre of perspectives. Within my own situation that of the
patient whom I am questioning makes its appearance and, in this bi¬
polar phenomenon. I learn to know both myself and others. We
must put ourselves back in the actual situation in which hallucina¬
tions and ‘reality’ are presented to us, and grasp their concrete
differentiation at the time that it operates in communication with
the patient. I am sitting before my subject and chatting with him;
he is trying to describe to me what he ‘sees’ and what he ‘hears’; it is
not a question either of taking him at his word, or of reducing his
experiences to mine, or coinciding with him, or sticking to my own
point of view, but of making explicit my experience, and also his
experience as it is conveyed to me in my own, and his hallucinatory
belief and my real belief, and to understand one tlirough the
other.

The fact that I classify the voices and visions of my interlocutor as
hallucinations means that I find nothing similar in my visual or
auditory world. I am therefore aware of apprehending, through hear¬
ing and.jjarticularly tlirough sight, a system of phenomena which
makes up not only a private spectacle, but which is the only possible
one for me and even for ethers, and tins is wliat is called reality. The
perceived world is not only my world, but the one in which I see the
behaviour of other people take shape, for their behaviour equally
aims at this world, which is the counterpart not only of my conscious¬
ness, but of any consciousness which I can possibly encounter. What I
see with my eyes exhausts for me the possibilities of vision. It is true
that I see what I do see only from a certain angle, and I concede that
a spectator differently placed sees what I can only conjecture. But
these other spectacles are implied in mine at this moment, just as the
reverse or the underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously
with their visible aspect, or as the next room pre-exists in relation to
the perception which I should actually have if I walked into it. The
experiences of other people or those which await me if I change my
position merely develop what is suggested by the horizons of my
present experience, and add nothing to it. My perception brings into
co-existence an indefinite number of perceptual chains which, if
followed up, would confirm it in all respects and accord with it. My
eyes and my hand know that any actual change of place would pro¬
duce a sensible response entirely according to my expectation, and I
can feel swarming beneath my gaze the countless mass of more de¬
tailed perceptions that I anticipate, and upon which I already have a
hold. I am, therefore, conscious of perceiving a setting which
‘tolerates* nothing more than is written or foreshadowed in my per¬
ception, and I am in present communication with a consummate

338

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

fullness.1 The victim of hallucination enjoys no such belief: the
hallucinatory phenomenon is no part of the world, that is to say, it is
not accessible , there is no definite path leading from it to all the
remaining experiences of the deluded subject, or to the experience of
the sane. ‘Can’t you hear my voices?’ asks the patient; ‘then I must
be the only one to hear them.’2 Hallucinations are played out on a
stage different from that of the perceived world, and are in a way
superimposed : ‘Do you know,’ says one patient, ‘while we are talk¬
ing, someone is saying one thing or another to me. Now where can
it all come from ?’ 3 The fact that the hallucination does not take its
place in the stable and intersubjective world means that it lacks the
fullness, the inner articulation which makes the real thing reside ‘in
itself’, and act and exist by itself. The hallucinatory thing is not, as is
the real thing, packed with small perceptions which sustain it in
existence. It is an implicit and inarticulate significance. Confronted by
the real thing, our behaviour feels itself motivated by ‘stimuli’ which
fill out and vindicate its intention. Where a phantasm is concerned,
the initiative comes from us, and it has no external counterpart.4 5
The hallucinatory thing is not, like the real thing, a form of being
with depth, which compresses within itself a thickness of duration;
nor is hallucination, like perception, my concrete hold on time in a
living present. It glides over time as it does over the surface of the
world. The person who speaks to me in my dream has no sooner
opened his mouth before his thought is conveyed miraculously to
me; I know what the person is saying to me before he says anything
at all. The hallucination is not in the world but ‘before’ it, because
the patient’s body no longer enjoys its insertion into the system of
appearances. All hallucination bears initially on one’s own body. ‘It is
as if I heard with my mouth.’ ‘The person speaking is on my lips,’
say patients.6 * In ‘feelings of bodily presence’ ( leibhaften Bewusst-
heiten) patients feel the presence of someone they never see close to
them, or behind them, or on them, and they experience that presence
as drawing closer or receding. One schizophrenic woman constantly
has the impression that she is being seen naked from behind. George
Sand has a double whom she has never seen, but who sees her the
whole time and calls her by her name with her own voice.6 Deper¬
sonalization and disturbance of the body image are immediately

1 Minkowski, Le ProbUme des hallucinations et le probUme de respace , p. 66.

2 Ibid., p. 64. 8 Ibid., p. 66.

4 That is why Palagyi could assert that perception is a ‘direct phantasm’,
hallucination an ‘inverse phantasm’. Schorsch, Zur Theorie der Halluzinationen ,

p. 64.

5 Schroder, Das Haltuzinieren, p. 606.

6 Menninger-Lerchental, Das Truggebilde der Eigenen Gestalt, pp. 76 and ff.

339

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

translated into an external phantasm, because it is one and the same
thing for us to perceive our body and to perceive our situation in a
certain physical and human setting, for our body is nothing but that
very situation in so far as it is realized and actualized. In extra-
campine * hallucination the patient believes that he sees a man be¬
hind him, that he sees simultaneously in all directions round about
him, that he can look through a window situated behind his back.1
The illusion of seeing is, therefore, much less the presentation of an
illusory object than the spread and, so to speak, running wild of a
visual power which has lost any sensory counterpart. There are
hallucinations because through the phenomenal body we are in
constant relationship with an environment into which that body is
projected, and because, when divorced from its actual environment,
the body remains able to summon up, by means of its own settings,
the pseudo-presence of that environment. To that extent, the thing in
hallucination is never seen and is never visible. One subject, under
mescalin, sees the screw of a piece of apparatus as a glass bulb or a
protuberance on a rubber balloon. But what precisely does he see?
‘I perceive a world covered with swellings. ... It is as if my percep¬
tion suddenly changed key to become perception in intumescence, as
one plays a piece of music in C or B flat. . . . Just then, my whole
perception was transformed and, for an instant, I perceived a rubber
bulb. Does that mean that I saw nothing else? No, but I had the
feeling of being transferred to a setting such that I could perceive in
no other way. The belief took possession of me that the world is
thus. . . . Later another change took place. . . . Everything seemed
at once clammy and scaly, like some of the large serpents I have seen
uncoiling themselves at the Berlin Zoo. Then I was seized with the
fear of being on a small island surrounded by serpents.’2 Hallucina¬
tion does not present me with protuberances, or scales, or words like
ponderous realities gradually revealing their meaning. It does no
more than reproduce for me the way in which these realities strike
me in my being of feeling and of language. When the patient refuses
food because it is ‘poisoned’, we need to realize that for him the
word has not the sense that it would have for a chemist : 3 the patient
does not believe that the food possesses properties which are actu¬
ally poisonous to the objective body. The poison in this case is an
affective entity, a magic presence comparable to that of illness or
misfortune. The majority of hallucinations are not things with

* I.e. when the patient believes he perceives outside the sensory field presented
to him (Translator’s note).

1 Menninger-Lerchental, Das Truggebilde der Eigenen Gestalt , p. 147.

2 Unpublished self-observation of J. P. Sartre.

3 Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne) p. 290.

340

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

different facets, but short-lived phenomena, such as pricking sensa¬
tions, jolts, explosions, draughts, waves of cold or heat, sparks,
points of bright light, glowing lights or silhouetted shapes.1 When it
is a question of real things, a rat for example, these are represented
only by their general style and physiognomy. These disjoined pheno¬
mena do not admit of precise causal connections among themselves.
Their sole mutual relationship is one of co-existence — a co-existence
which always has a significance for the patient, since awareness of
contingency presupposes definite and distinct causal sequences, and
since we are here among the odd remnants of a world in ruins. ‘A
running nose becomes a specific flow, and the fact of dozing in an
underground train acquires a strange and unique significance’.2
Hallucinations are associated with a certain sensory realm only in so
far as each sensory field provides the distortion of existence with
particular possibilities of expression. The schizophrenic’s hallucina¬
tions are predominantly auditory and tactile, because the world of
hearing and touch, in virtue of its natural structure, is better able to
stand for an existence which is possessed, jeopardized and de-
individualized. The heavy drinker experiences predominantly visual
hallucinations because sight provides the disordered processes with
a means of calling into being an opponent or a task which have to
be faced.3 The victim of hallucination does not see and hear in the
normal sense, but makes use of his sensory fields and his natural
insertion into a world in order to build up, out of the fragments of
this world, an artificial world answering to the total intention of his
being.

But though hallucination is not a sensory process, still less is it a
judgement. It is not given to the subject as a construction, and has
no place in the ‘geographical world’, in the being, that is, which we
know and judge, in the network of facts subject to laws, but in the
individual ‘landscape’4 through which the world impinges upon us,

1 Minkowski, Le Probleme des hallucinations ct le problems de Ve space, p. 67.

2 Ibid., p. 68.

3 Straus, op. cit., p. 288.

4 Ibid. The patient ‘lives within the horizon of his landscape, under the sway of
univocal impressions which, lacking any motif or basis, are no longer made to fit
into the universal order of the world of things, or into the universal sense-relation¬
ships of language. The things to which patients refer by familiar names have
ceased to be the same things for them that they are for us. What they have re¬
tained and made into parts of their landscape are mere broken remnants of our
world, and even these do not remain what they were as parts of the whole.’ Things
for the schizophrenic are frozen and inert, whereas those of delirium are com¬
municative and living to a greater degree than are ours. ‘If the illness grows worse,
the disintegration of thought and the disappearance of speech reveal the loss of
geographical space, and the blunted feelings reveal the impoverishment of the
landscape.’ (Straus, op. cit., p. 291.)

341

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

and by means of which we are in vital communication with it. A
woman patient declares that someone looked at her at the markets
and that she felt the gaze fall upon her like a Mow* but could not say
whence it came. She cannot bring herself to say that in common
property space there stood a flesh and blood person who turned his
eyes towards her— and it is because of this refusal that the arguments
that we can bring against her leave her completely unmoved. For her
it is not a matter of what happens in the objective world, but of what
she encounters, what touches her or strikes her. The food refused
by the victim of hallucinations is poisoned only for him, but to this
extent it is poisoned irrefutably. The hallucination is not a percep¬
tion, but it has the value of reality , and it alone counts for the victim.
The world has lost its expressive force,1 and the hallucinatory system
has usurped it. Although hallucination is not a perception, there is a
hallucinatory deception, and this is what we shall never understand
if we take hallucination to be an intellectual operation. However
different it is from a perception, hallucination must be able to sup¬
plant it, and exist for the patient in a higher degree than his own
perceptions. This can be so only so long as hallucination and per¬
ception are modalities of one single primordial function, through
which we arrange round about us a setting of definite structure,
through which we are enabled to place ourselves at one time fairly
and squarely in the world, and at another marginally to it. The
patient’s existence is displaced from its centre, being no longer en¬
acted through dealings with a harsh, resistant and intractable world
which has no knowledge of us, but expending its substance in isola¬
tion creating a fictitious setting for itself. But this fiction can have the
value of reality only because in the normal subject reality itself suffers
through an analogous process . In so far as he too has sensory fields
and a body, the normal person is equally afflicted with this gaping
wound through which illusion can make its way in. His representa¬
tion of the world is no less vulnerable. In so far as we believe what we
see, we do so without any verification, and the mistake of the tradi¬
tional theories of perception is to introduce into perception itself
intellectual operations and a critical examination of the evidence of

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founders in ambiguity. In the case of the normal subject private
experience, independently of any express verification, links up with
itself and with experiences of external origin, so that the landscape
opens on to a geographical world and tends towards absolute pleni¬
tude. The normal person does not find satisfaction in subjectivity,

1 Hallucination, says Klages, supposes a ‘ Verminderung des Ausdrucksgehaltes
der iiusseren Erscheinungswelt\ Quoted by Schorsch, Zur Theorie der Halluzina-
tionen , p. 71.

342

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

he runs away from it, he is genuinely concerned with being in the
world, and his hold on time is direct and unreflecting, whereas the
sufferer from hallucinations simply exploits his being in the world in
order to carve a private sector for himself out of the common pro¬
perty world, and constantly runs up against the transcendence of
time. Underlying express acts which enable me to posit before my¬
self an object at its distance, standing in a definite relation to other
objects, and having specific characteristics which can be observed,
underlying perceptions properly understood, there is, then, sus¬
taining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects
would lack the distinctive sign of reality, as they do for the schizo¬
phrenic, and through which they begin to count or be valid for us.
It is the momentum which carries us beyond subjectivity, which gives
us our place in the world prior to any science and any verification,
through a kind of ‘faith’ or ‘primary opinion’1 — or which may, on
the other hand, become bogged down in our private appearances.
In this realm of primary opinion, hallucinatory illusion is possible
even though hallucination is never perception, and though the true
world is always suspected as there by the patient, even as he turns
away from it, because we are still in the antepredicative world, and
because the connection between appearance and total experience is
merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception.
The child attributes his dreams, no less than his perceptions, to the
world; he believes that the dream is enacted in his room, at the foot
of his bed, the sole difference from perception being that the dream
is visible to sleepers alone.2 The world is still the vague theatre of all
experiences. It takes in without discrimination real objects on the
one hand and individual and momentary phantasms on the other —
because it is an individual which embraces everything and not a
collection of objects linked by causal relations. To have hallucina¬
tions and more generally to imagine, is to exploit this tolerance on
the part of the antepredicative world, and our bewildering proximity
to the whole of being in syncretic experience.

We succeed, therefore, in accounting for hallucinatory deception
only by removing apodeictic certainty from perception and full self-
possession from perceptual consciousness. The existence of the per¬
cept is never necessary, since perception entails a process of making
explicit which could be pursued to infinity and which, moreover,
could not gain in one direction without losing in another, and with¬
out being exposed to the risks of time. But it must not be concluded
from this that the percept is only possible or probable, and that it
can be brought down, for instance, to a permanent possibility of

1 Urdoxa or Urglaube, of Husserl.

2 Piaget, La Representation du monde chez r enfant , pp. 69 and ff.

343

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

perception. Possibility and probability presuppose the prior experience
of error, and correspond to a state of doubt. The percept is and re¬
mains, despite all critical education, on the hither side of doubt and
demonstration. The sun ‘rises’ for the scientist in the same way as it
does for the uneducated person, and our scientific representations
of the solar system remain matters of hearsay, like lunar landscapes,
and we never believe in them in the sense in which we believe in the
sunrise. The sunrise and the percept in general is ‘real’, and we spon¬
taneously identify them as part of the world. Each perception, though
always capable of being ‘cancelled’ and relegated among illusions,
disappears only to give place to another perception which rectifies it.
Each thing can, after the event, appear uncertain, but what is at least
certain for us is that there are things, that is to say, a world. To ask
oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is
asking, since the world is not a sum of things which might always be
called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which
things are drawn. The percept taken in its entirety, with the world
horizon which announces both its possible disjunction and its possible
replacement by another perception , certainly does not mislead us.
There could not possibly be error where there is not yet truth, but
reality, and not yet necessity, but faeticity. Correspondingly, we must
refuse to attribute to perceptual consciousness the full possession of
itself, and that immanence which would rule out any possible
illusion. If hallucinations are to be possible, it is necessary that con¬
sciousness should, at some moment, cease to know what it is doing,
otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, and
would not stand by it, so there would no longer be any illusion at all.
And if, as we have said, the illusory thing and the true thing do not
have the same structure, for the patient to assent to the illusion, he
must forget or repress the true world, and cease to refer back to it,
and retain at least the ability to revert to the primitive confusion of
the true and the false. Yet we do not cut consciousness off from itself,
which would preclude all progress of knowledge beyond primary
opinion, and especially the philosophic examination of primary
opinion as the basis of all knowledge. All that is required is that the
concidence of myself with myself, as it is achieved in the cogito ,
shall never be a real coincidence, but merely an intentional and
presumptive one. In fact, between myself who have just thought this,
and myself who am thinking that I have thought it, there is inter¬
posed already a thickness of duration, so that I may always doubt
whether that thought which has already passed was indeed such as
I now see it to have been. Since, furthermore, I have no evidence of
my past other than this present testimony and yet have the idea of a
past, I have no reason to set over the unreflective, as an unknowable,

344

THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD

against the reflection which I bring to bear on it. But my confidence
in reflection amounts in the last resort to my accepting and acting on
the fact of temporality, and the fact of the world as the invariable
framework of all illusion and all disillusion: I know myself only in
so far as I am inherent in time and in the world, that is, I know
myself only in my ambiguity.

345

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE
HUMAN WORLD

I AM thrown into a nature, and that nature appears not only as
outside me, in objects devoid of history, but it is also discernible at
the centre of subjectivity. Theoretical and practical decisions of per¬
sonal life may well lay hold, from a distance, upon my past and my
future, and bestow upon my past, with all its fortuitous events, a
definite significance, by following it up with a future which will be
seen after the event as foreshadowed by it, thus introducing his¬
toricity into my life. Yet these sequences have always something
artificial about them. It is at the present time that I realize that the
first twenty-five years of my life were a prolonged childhood, destined
to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to independence.
If I take myself back to those years as I actually lived them and as I
carry them within me, my happiness at that time cannot be explained
in terms of the sheltered atmosphere of the parental home; the world
itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating, and I can
never be sure of reaching a fuller understanding of my past than it
had of itself at the time I lived through it, nor of silencing its protest.
The interpretation which I now give of it is bound up with my con¬
fidence in psychoanalysis. Tomorrow, with more experience and
insight, I shall possibly understand it differently, and consequently
reconstruct my past in a different way. In any case, I shall go on to
interpret my present interpretations in their turn, revealing their latent
content and, in order finally to assess their truth-value, I shall need
to keep these discoveries in mind. My hold on the past and the future
is precarious, and my possession of my own time is always postponed
until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never
be reached, since it would be one more moment, bounded by the
horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn further developments
in order to be understood. My voluntary and rational life, therefore,

346

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

knows that it merges into another power which stands in the way of
its completion, and gives it a permanently tentative look. Natural
time is always there. The transcendence of the instants of time is both
the ground of, and the impediment to, the rationality of my personal
history: the ground because it opens a totally new future to me in
which I shall be able to reflect upon the element of opacity in my
present, a source of danger in so far as I shall never manage to seize
the present through which I live with apodeictic certainty, and since
the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible, what I understand
never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never
quite at one with myself. Such is the lot of a being who is born, that
is, who once and for all has been given to himself as something to be
understood. Since natural time remains at the centre of my history, I
see myself surrounded by it. The fact that my earliest years lie behind
me like an unknown land is not attributable to any chance lapse of
memory, or any failure to think back adequately: there is nothing to
be known in these unexplored lands. For example, in pre-natal exis¬
tence, nothing was perceived, and therefore there is nothing to recall.
There was nothing but the raw material and adumbration of a natural
self and a natural time. This anonymous life is merely the extreme
form of that temporal dispersal which constantly threatens the his¬
torical present. In order to have some inkling of the nature of that
amorphous existence which preceded my own history, and which will
bring it to a close, I have only to look within me at that time which
pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life
utilizes but does not entirely overlay. Because I am borne into per¬
sonal existence by a time which I do not constitute, all my percep¬
tions stand out against a background of nature. While I perceive,
and even without having any knowledge of the organic conditions of
my perception, I am aware of drawing together somewhat absent-
minded and dispersed “consciousnesses” : sight, hearing and
touch, with their fields, which are anterior, and remain alien, to my
personal life. The natural object is the track left by this generalized
existence. And every object will be, in the first place and in some re¬
spect, a natural object, made up of colours, tactile and auditory
qualities, in so far as it is destined to enter my life.

Just as nature finds its way to the core of my personal life and be¬
comes inextricably linked with it, so behaviour patterns settle into
that nature, being deposited in the form of a cultural world. Not only
have I a physical world, not only do I live in the midst of earth, air
and water, I have around me roads, plantations, villages, streets,
churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe. Each of these objects
is moulded to the human action which it serves. Each one spreads
round it an atmosphere of humanity which may be determinate in a
2A 347

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

low degree, in the case of a few footmarks in the sand, or on the
other hand highly determinate, if I go into every room from top to
bottom of a house recently evacuated. Now, although it may not be
surprising that the sensory and perceptual functions should lay
down a natural world in front of themselves, sjtice they are preper¬
sonal, it may well seem strange that the spontaneous acts through
, which man has patterned his life should be deposited, like some sedi-
; ment, outside himself and lead an anonymous existence as things.
The civilization in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident
way in the implements with which it provides itself. If it is a question
of an unknown or alien civilization, then several manners of being or
of living can find their place in the ruins or the broken instruments
which I discover, or in the landscape through which I roam. The cul¬
tural world is then ambiguous, but it is already present. I have before
me a society to be known. An Objective Spirit dwells in the remains
and the scenery. How is this possible? In the cultural object, I feel
the close presence of others beneath a veil of anonymity. Someone
uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating, the bell for summon¬
ing, and it is through the perception of a human act and another per¬
son that the perception of a cultural world could be verified. How
can an action or a human thought be grasped in the mode of the
‘one’ since, by its very nature, it is a first person operation, insepar¬
able from an 7? It is easy to reply that the indefinite pronoun is here
no more than a vague formula for referring to a multiplicity of 7\s or
even a general 7. It will be said that I experience a certain cultural
environment along with behaviour corresponding to it : faced with
the remains of an extinct civilization, I conceive analogically the kind
of man who lived in it. But the first need is to know how I experience
my own cultural world, my own civilization. The reply will once more
be that I see a certain use made by other men of the implements
which surround me, that I interpret their behaviour by analogy with
my own, and through my inner experience* which teaches me the
significance and intention of perceived gestures. In the last resort, the
actions of others are, according to this theory, always understood
through my own; the ‘one’ or the ‘we’ through the T. But this is pre¬
cisely the question: how can the word T be put into the plural, how
can a general idea of the 7 be formed, how can I speak of an 7 other
than my own, how can I know that there are other 7’s, how can con¬
sciousness which, by its nature, and as self-knowledge, is in the mode
of the 7, be grasped in the mode of Thou, and through this, in the
world of the ‘One’? The very first of all cultural objects, and the one
by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the
vehicle of a form of behaviour. Whether it be a question of vestiges
or the body of another person, we need to know how an object in

348

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

space can become the eloquent relic of an existence ; how, conversely,
an intention, a thought or a project can detach themselves from the
personal subject and become visible outside him in the shape of his
body, and in the environment which he builds for himself. The con¬
stitution of the other person does not fully elucidate that of society,
which is not an existence involving two or even three people, but
co-existence involving an indefinite number of consciousnesses. Yet
the analysis of the perception of others runs up against the difficulty
of fundamental idea raised by the cultural world, since it is called
upon to solve the paradox of a consciousness seen from the outside,
of a thought which has its abode in the external world, and which,
therefore, is already subjectless and anonymous compared with mine.

What we have said about the body provides the beginning of a
solution to this problem. The existence of other people is a difficulty
and an outrage for objective thought. If the events of the world are,
in Lachelier’s words, a network of general properties standing at the
point of intersection of functional relations which, in principle, en¬
able the analysis of the former to be carried through, and if the body
is indeed a province of the world, if it is that object which the biolo¬
gist talks about, that conjunction of processes analysed in physio¬
logical treatises, that collection of organs shown in the plates of
books on anatomy, then my experience can be nothing but the
dialogue between bare consciousness and the system of objective
correlations which it conceives. The body of another, like my own,
is not inhabited, but is an object standing before the consciousness
which thinks about or constitutes it. Other men, and myself, seen
as empirical beings, are merely pieces of mechanism worked by
springs, but the true subject has no counterpart, for that conscious¬
ness which is hidden in so much flesh and blood is the least intelli¬
gible of occult qualities. My consciousness, being co-extensive with
what can exist for me, and corresponding to the whole system of
experience, cannot encounter, in that system, another consciousness
capable of bringing immediately to light in the world the background,
unknown to me, of its own phenomena. There are two modes of
being, and two only: being in itself, which is that of objects arrayed
in space, and being for itself, which is that of consciousness. Now,
another person would seem to stand before me as an in-itself and yet
to exist for himself, thus requiring of me, in order to be perceived, a
contradictory operation, since I ought both to distinguish him from
myself, and therefore place him in the world of objects, and think
of him as a consciousness, that is, the sort of being with no outside
and no parts, to which I have access merely because that being is my¬
self, and because the thinker and the thought about are amalgamated
in him. There is thus no place for other people and a plurality of

349

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

consciousnesses in objective thought. In so far as I constitute the
world, I cannot conceive another consciousness, for it too would
have to constitute the world and, at least as regards this other view
of the world, I should not be the constituting agent. Even if I suc¬
ceeded in thinking of it as constituting the world, it would be I who
would be constituting the consciousness as such, and once more I
should be the sole constituting agent.

But we have in fact learned to shed doubt upon objective thought,
and have made contact, on the hither side of scientific representations
of the world and the body, with an experience of the body and the
world which these scientific approaches do not successfully embrace.
My body and the world are no longer objects co-ordinated together
by the kind of functional relationships that physics establishes. The
system of experience in which they intercommunicate is not spread
out before me and ranged over by a constituting consciousness. I have
the world as an incomplete individual, through the agency of my
body as the potentiality of this world, and I have the positing of
objects through that of my body, or conversely the positing of my
body through that of objects, not in any kind of logical implication,
as we determine an unknown size through its objective relations to
given sizes, but m a real implication, and because my body is a move¬
ment towards the world, and the world my body’s point of support.
The ideal of objective thought — the system of experience conceived
as a cluster of physico-mathematical correlations — is grounded in
my perception of the world as an individual concordant with itself,
and when science tries to include my body among the relationships
obtaining in the objective world, it is because it is trying, in its way,
to translate the suturation of my phenomenal body on to the pri¬
mordial world. At the same time as the body withdraws from the
objective world, and forms between the pure subject and the object
a third genus of being, the subject loses its purity and its trans¬
parency. Objects stand before me and throw on to my retina a cer¬
tain projection of themselves, and I perceive them. There can no
longer be any question of isolating, in my physiological representation
of the phenomenon, the retinal images and their cerebral counter¬
part from the toial field, actual and possible, in which they appear.
The physiological event is merely the abstract schema of the per¬
ceptual event.1 Nor can one invoke, under the name of mental
images, discontinuous, perspective views corresponding to the suc¬
cessive retinal images, or finally bring in an ‘inspection of the mind*
which restores the object beyond the distorting perspectives. We
must conceive the perspectives and the point of view as our insertion
into the world-as-an-individual, and perception, no longer as a con-
1 La Structure du Comport ement, p. 125.

350

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

stitution of the true object, but as our inherence in things. Con¬
sciousness reveals in itself, along with the sensory fields and with the
world as the field of all fields, the opacity of a primary past. If I ex¬
perience this inhering of my consciousness in its body and its world,
the perception of other people and the plurality of consciousnesses
no longer present any difficulty. If, for myself who am reflecting on
perception, the perceiving subject appears provided with a primor¬
dial setting in relation to the world, drawing in its train that bodily
thing in the absence of which there would be no other things for it,
then why should other bodies which I perceive not be similarly in¬
habited by consciousnesses? If my consciousness has a body, why
should other bodies not ‘have’ consciousnesses? Clearly this in¬
volves a profound transformation of the notions of body and con¬
sciousness. As far as the body is concerned, even the body of another,
we must learn to distinguish it from the objective body as set forth
in works on physiology. This is not the body which is capable of
being inhabited by a consciousness. We must restore to visible bodies
those forms of behaviour which are outlined by them and which
appear on them, but are not really contained in them.1 How signi¬
ficance and intentionality could come to dwell in molecular edifices
or masses of cells is a thing which can never be made comprehensible,
and here Cartesianism is right. But there is, in any case, no question
of any such absurd undertaking. It is simply a question of recogniz¬
ing that the body, as a chemical structure or an agglomeration of
tissues, is formed, by a process of impoverishment, from a primordial
phenomenon of the body-for-us, the body of human experience or
the perceived body, round which objective thought works, but with¬
out being called upon to postulate its completed analysis. As for
consciousness, it has to be conceived, no longer as a constituting
consciousness and, as it were, a pure being-for-itself, but as a per¬
ceptual consciousness, as the subject of a pattern of behaviour, as
being in the world or existence, for only thus can another appear at
the top of his phenomenal body, and be endowed with a sort of
‘locality’. Under these conditions the antinomies of objective thought
vanish. Through phenomenological reflection I discover vision, not
as a ‘thinking about seeing’, to use Descartes’ expression, but as a
gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can
be another’s gaze; that expressive instrument called a face can carry
an existence, as my own existence is carried by my body, that know-
ledge-acquiring apparatus. When I turn towards perception, and
pass from direct perception to thinking about that perception, I re¬
enact it, and find at work in my organs of perception a thought

1 This task we have tried to perform elsewhere. (La Structure du Comportement,
Chaps. I and II.)

351

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

older than myself of which those organs are merely the trace. In the
same way I understand the existence of other people. Here again I
have only the trace of a consciousness which evades me in its actual¬
ity and, when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien exis¬
tence in a sort of reflection. There is nothing here resembling
‘reasoning by analogy’. As Scheler so rightly declares, reasoning by
analogy presupposes what it is called on to explain. The other con¬
sciousness can be deduced only if the emotional expressions of others
are compared and identified with mine, and precise correlations
recognized between my physical behaviour and my ‘psychic events’.
Now the perception of others is anterior to, and the condition of,
such observations, the observations do not constitute the perception.
A baby of fifteen months opens its mouth if I playfully take one of
its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has
scarcely looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case
like mine. The fact is that its own mouth and teeth, as it feels them
from the inside, are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with,
and my jaw, as the baby sees it from the outside, is immediately,
for it, capable of the same intentions. ‘Biting’ has immediately, for
it, an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its
body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its
own body. The observed correlations between my physical behaviour
and that of others, my intentions and my pantomime, may well pro¬
vide me with a clue in the methodical attempt to know others and
on occasions when direct perception fails, but they do not teach me
the existence of other people. Between my consciousness and my
body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and
that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal
relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the
system. The possibility of another person’s being self-evident is owed
to the fact that I am not transparent for myself, and that my sub¬
jectivity draws its body in its wake. We said earlier: in so far as the
other person resides in the world, is visible there, and forms a part
of my field, he is never an Ego in the sense in which I am one for
myself. In order to think of him as a genuine /, I ought to think of

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the knowledge which I have of myself. But if another’s body is not
an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifesta¬
tions of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the
status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other
reduce him to the status of an object in mine. The other person is
never quite a personal being, if I myself am totally one, and if I grasp
myself as apodeictically self-evident. But if I find in myself, through
reflection, along with the perceiving subject, a pre-personal subject

352

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

given to itself, and if my perceptions are centred outside me as sources
of initiative and judgement, if the perceived world remains in a state
of neutrality, being neither verified as an object nor recognized as a
dream, then it is not the case that everything that appears in the
world is arrayed before me, and so the behaviour of other people can
have its place there. This world may remain undivided between my
perception and his, the self which perceives being in no particularly
privileged position which rules out a perceived self; both are, not
cogitationes shut up in their own immanence, but beings which are
outrun by their world, and which consequently may well be outrun
by each other. The affirmation of an alien consciousness standing
over against mine would immediately make my experience into a
private spectacle, since it would no longer be co-extensive with being.
The cogito of another person strips my own cogito of all value, and
causes me to lose the assurance which I enjoyed in my solitude of
having access to the only being conceivable for me, being, that is, as
it is aimed at and constituted by me. But we have learned in indivi¬
dual perception not to conceive our perspective views as independent
of each other; we know that they slip into each other and are brought
together finally in the thing. In the same way we must learn to find
the communication between one consciousness and another in one
and the same world. In reality, other people are not included in my
perspective of the world because this perspective itself has no de¬
finite limits, because it slips spontaneously into the other person’s,
and because both are brought together in the one single world in
which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.

In so far as I have sensory functions, a visual, auditory and tactile
field, I am already in communication with others taken as similar
psycho-physical subjects. No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living
body in process of acting than the objects surrounding it immediately
take on a fresh layer of significance : they are no longer simply what
I myself could make of them, they are what this other pattern of be¬
haviour is about to make of them. Round about the perceived body
a vortex forms, towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak,
sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer merely mine, and no longer
merely present, it is present to x , to that other manifestation of be¬
haviour which begins to take shape in it. Already the other body has
ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and become the theatre
of a certain process of elaboration, and, as it were, a certain ‘view’
of the world. There is taking place over there a certain manipulation
of things hitherto my property. Someone is making- use of my
familiar objects. But who can it be? I say that it is another person, a
second self, and this I know in the first place because this living body
has the same structure as mine. I experience my own body as the

353

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

power of adopting certain forms of behaviour and a certain world,
and I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world:
now, it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another
person, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation
of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world.
Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so
my body and the other person’s are one whole, two sides of one and
the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my
body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies
simultaneously.1 All of which makes another living being, but not
yet another man. But this alien life, like mine with which it is in com¬
munication, is an open life. It is not entirely accounted for by a cer¬
tain number of biological or sensory functions. It annexes ^ tural
objects by diverting them from their immediate significance, it makes
tools for itself, and projects itself into the environment in the shape
of cultural objects. The child finds them around him at birth like
meteorites from another planet. He appropriates them and learns to
use them as others do, because the body image ensures the immedi¬
ate correspondence of what he sees done and what he himself does,
and because in that way the implement is fixed in his mind as a de¬
terminate manipulandum . and other people as centres of human
action. There is one particular cultural object which is destined to
play a crucial r61e in the perception of other people: language. In
the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other
person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter¬
woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor
are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted
into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have
here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of
behaviour in my transcendental field, nor I in his ; we are collabora¬
tors for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives
merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In
the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person’s
thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do
grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate
them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to
what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed,
so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by
making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have with¬
drawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reinte¬
grate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history,

1 That is why disturbances affecting a subject's body image can be unearthed
by requiring him to point out on the doctor's body the part of his own which is
being touched.

354

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HOMAN WORLD

and that the other recedes into his absence, or, in so far as he re¬
mains present for me, is felt as a threat. The perception of other
people and the intersubjective world are problematical only for
adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes
accessible to all around him. He has no awareness of himself or of
others as private subjectivities, nor does he suspect that all of us,
himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the
world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he be¬
lieves as they present themselves, without attempting to link them to
each other, nor our words, to any sort of criticism. He has no know¬
ledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards
one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even
dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it
is not distinct from words. Others are for him so many gazes which
inspect things, and have an almost material existence, so much so
that the child wonders how these gazes avoid being broken as they
meet.1 At about twelve years old, says Piaget, the child achieves the
cogito and reaches the truths of rationalism. At this stage, it is held,
he discovers himself both as a point of view on the world and also
as called upon to transcend that point of view, and to construct an
objectivity at the level' of judgement. Piaget brings the child to a
mature outlook as if the thoughts of the adult were self-sufficient and
disposed of all contradictions. But, in reality, it must be the case that
the child’s outlook is in some way vindicated against the adult’s and
against Piaget, and that the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest
years remains as an indispensable acquisition underlying that of
maturity, if there is to be for the adult one single intersubjective
world. My awareness of constructing an objective truth would never
provide me with anything more than an objective truth for me, and
my greatest attempt at impartiality would never enable me to prevail
over my subjectivity (as Descartes so well expresses it by the hypo¬
thesis of the malignant demon), if I had not, underlying my judge¬
ments, the primordial certainty of being in contact with being itself,
if, before any voluntary adoption of a position I were not already
situated in an intersubjective world, and if science too were not up¬
held by this basic 8 o£a. With the cogito begins that struggle between
consciousnesses, each one of which, as Hegel says, seeks the death of
the other. For the struggle ever to begin, and for each consciousness
to be capable of suspecting the alien presences which it negates,
all must necessarily have some common ground and be mindful of
their peaceful co-existence in the world of childhood.

But is it indeed other people that we arrive at in this way ? What
we do in effect is to iron out the I and the Thou in an experience
1 Piaget, La Representation du monde chez V enfant, p. 21.

355

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

shared by a plurality, thus introducing the impersonal into the heart
of subjectivity and eliminating the individuality of perspectives. But
have we not, in this general confusion, done away with the alter Ego
as well as the Ego ? We said earlier that they are mutually exclusive.
But this is only because they both lay the same claims, and because
the alter Ego follows all the variations of the Ego : if the perceiving /
is genuinely an /, it cannot perceive a different one; if the perceiving
subject is anonymous, the other which it perceives is equally so; so
when, within this collective consciousness, we try to bring out the
plurality of consciousnesses, we shall find ourselves back with the
difficulties which we thought we had left behind. I perceive the other
person as a piece of behaviour, for example, I perceive the grief or
the anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or his hands, without
recourse to any ‘inner’ experience of suffering or anger, and because
grief and anger are variations of belonging to the world, undivided
between the body and consciousness, and equally applicable to the
other person’s conduct, visible in his phenomenal body, as in my
own conduct as it is presented to me. But then, the behaviour of
another person, and even his words, are not that other person. The
grief and the anger of another have never quite the same significant
for him as they have for me. For him these situations are lived
through, for me they are displayed. Or in so far as I can, by some
friendly gesture, become part of that grief or that anger, they still
remain the grief and anger of my friend Paul: Paul suffers because
he has lost his wife, or is angry because his watch has been stolen,
whereas I suffer because Paul is grieved, or I am angry because he is
angry, and our situations cannot be superimposed on each other. If,
moreover, we undertake some project in common, this common
project is not one single project, it does not appear in the selfsame
light to both of us, we are not both equally enthusiastic about it, or
at any rate not in quite the same way, simply because Paul is Paul and
I am myself. Although his consciousness and mine, working through
our respective situations, may contrive to produce a common situa¬
tion in which they can communcate, it is nevertheless from the sub¬
jectivity of each of us that each one projects this ‘one and only’
world. The difficulties inherent in considering the perception of other
people did not all stem from objective thought, nor do they all dis¬
solve with the discovery of behaviour, or rather objective thought
and the uniqueness of the cogito which flows from it are not fictions,
but firmly grounded phenomena of which we shall have to seek the
basis. The conflict between myself and the other does not begin only
when we try to think ourselves into the other and does not vanish if
we reintegrate thought into non-positing consciousness and unre-
flective living; it is already there if I try to live another’s experiences,

356

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

for example in the blindness of sacrifice. I enter into a pact with the
other person, having resolved to live in an interworld in which I
accord as much place to others as to myself. But this interworld is
still a project of mine, and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I
seek the welfare of another as if it were mine , since this very attach¬
ment to another’s interest still has its source in me.

In the absence of reciprocity there is no alter Ego, since the world
of the one then takes in completely that of the other, so that one feels
disinherited in favour of the other. This is what happens in the case
of a couple where there is more love felt on one side than on the
other: one throws himself, and his whole life, into his love, the other
remains free, finding in this love a merely contingent manner of liv¬
ing. The former feels his being and substance flowing away into that
freedom which confronts him, whole and unqualified. And even if
the second partner, through fidelity to his vows or through generos¬
ity, tries to reciprocate by reducing himself, or herself, to the status
of a mere phenomenon in the other’s world, and to see himself
through the other’s eyes, he can succeed only by an expansion of his
own life, so that he denies by necessity the equivalence of himself
with the other that he is trying to posit. Co-existence must in all cases
be experienced on both sides. If neither of us is a constituting con¬
sciousness at the moment when we are about to communicate and
discover a common world, the question then is: who communicates,
and for whom does this world exist? And if someone does communi¬
cate with someone else, if the interworld is not an inconceivable in -
itself and must exist for both of us, then again communication breaks
down, and each of us operates in his own private world like two
players playing on two chessboards a hundred miles apart. But here
the players can still make known their moves to each other by tele¬
phone or correspondence, which means that they are in fact parti¬
cipants in the same world. I, on the other hand, share no common
ground with another person, for the positing of the other with his
world, and the positing of myself with mine are mutually exclusive.
Once the other is posited, once the other’s gaze fixed upon me has,
by inserting me into his field, stripped me of part of my being, it will
readily be understood that I can recover it only by establishing rela¬
tions with him, by bringing about his clear recognition of me, and
that my freedom requires the same freedom for others. But first we
need to know how it has been possible for me to posit the other. In
so far as I am born into the world, and have a body and a natural
world, I can find in that world other patterns of behaviour with
which my own interweave, as we have explained above. But also in
so far as I am born and my existence is already at work and is aware
that it is given to itself, it always remains on the hither side of the

357

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

acts in which it tries to become engaged and which are for ever mere
modalities of its own, and particular cases of its insurmountable
generality. It is this ground of given existence that is brought out by
the cogito : every assertion, every commitment, and even every nega¬
tion and doubt takes its place in a field open in advance, and testifies
to a self contiguous with itself before those particular acts in which it
loses contact with itself. This self, a witness to any actual communi¬
cation, and without which the latter would be ignorant of itself, and
would not, therefore, be communication at all, would seem to pre¬
clude any solution of the problem of other people. There is here a
solipsism rooted in living experience and quite insurmountable. It is
true that I do not feel that I am the constituting agent either of the
natural or of the cultural world: into each perception and into each
judgement I bring either sensory functions or cultural settings which
are not actually mine. Yet although I am outrun on all sides by my
own acts, and submerged in generality, the fact remains that I am
the one by whom they are experienced, and with my first perception
there was launched an insatiable being who appropriates everything
that he meets, to whom nothing can be purely and simply given
because he has inherited his share of the world, and hence carries
within him the project of all possible being, because it has been once
and for all imprinted in his field of experiences. The generality of the
body will never make it clear how the indeclinable / can estrange it¬
self in favour of another, since this generality is exactly compensated
by the other generality of my inalienable subjectivity. How should I
find elsewhere , in my perceptual field, such a presence of self to self?
Are we to say that the existence of the other person is for me a simple
fact? It is in any case a fact for me , and it must necessarily be among
my own possibilities, and understood or in some way experienced by
me in order to be valid as a fact.

After this failure to set limits to solipsism from the outside, are
we then to try to outrun it inwardly? It is true that I can recognize
only one Ego, but as universal subject I cease to be a finite self, and
become an impartial spectator before whom the other person and
myself, each as an empirical being, are on a footing of equality, with¬
out my en joying any particular privilege. Of the consciousness which
I discover by reflection and before which everything is an object, it
cannot be said that it is myself: my self is arrayed before me like any
other thing, and my consciousness constitutes it and is not enclosed
within it, so that it can without difficulty constitute other (my)selves.
In God I can be conscious of others as of myself, and love others as
myself. But the subjectivity that we have run up against does not
admit of being called God. If reflection reveals myself to me as an
infinite subject, we must recognize, at least at the level of appearance,

358

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

my ignorance of this self which is even more myself than 1. 1 knew it,
the reply will be, because I perceived both the other and myself, and
because this perception is possible only through him. But if I did
already know it, then all books of philosophy are useless. In fact, the
truth needs to be revealed. It was, therefore, this finite and ignorant
self which recognized God in itself, while God, beyond phenomena,
thought about himself since the beginning of time. It is through this
shadow that unavailing light manages to be shed on at least some¬
thing, and thus it is ultimately impossible to bring the shadow into
the light; I can never recognize myself as God without necessarily
denying what I am trying in fact to assert. I might love others as my¬
self in God, but even then my love of God would have to come not
from me, and would have to be truly, as Spinoza said, the love which
God has for himself through me. So that finally nowhere would there
be love of others or indeed others, but one single self-love linked to
itself beyond our own lives, and nowise relevant, indeed inaccessible,
to us. The act of reflection and love leading to God places the God
sought outside the realm of possibility.

We are thus brought back to solipsism, and the problem now
appears in all its difficulty. I am not God, but merely lay claim to
divinity. I escape from every involvement and transcend others in so
far as every situation and every other person must be experienced by
me in order to exist in my eyes. And yet other people have for me at
least an initial significance. As with the gods of polytheism, I have
to reckon with other gods, or again, as with Aristotle’s God, I
polarize a world which I do not create. Consciousnesses present
themselves with the absurdity of a multiple solipsism, such is the
situation which has to be understood. Since we live through this
situation, there must be some way of making it explicit. Solitude
and communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma, but two
‘moments’ of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do exist
for me. We must say of the experience of others what we have said
elsewhere about reflection: that its object cannot escape it entirely,
since we have a notion of the object only through the experience.
Reflection must in some way present the unreflective, otherwise we
should have nothing to set over against it, and it would not become
a problem for us. Similarly my experience must in some way present
me with other people, since otherwise 1 should have no occasion to
speak of solitude, and could not begin to pronounce other people
inaccessible. What is given and initially true, is a reflection open to
the unreflective, the reflective assumption of the unreflective — and
similarly there is given the tension of my experience towards another
whose existence on the horizon of my life is beyond doubt, even
when my knowledge of him is imperfect. There is more than a vague

359

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

analogy between the two problems, for in both cases it is a matter of
finding out how to steal a march on myself and experience the un-
reflective as such. How, then, can I who perceive, and who, ipso
facto, assert myself as universal subject, perceive another who im¬
mediately deprives me of this universality? The central phenomenon,
at the root of both my subjectivity and my transcendence towards
others, consists in my being given to myself. I am given, that is, I
find myself already situated and involved in a physical and social
world — lam given to myself, which means that this situation is never
hidden from me, it is never round about me as an alien necessity, and
I am never in effect enclosed in it like an object in a box. My free¬
dom, the fundamental power which I enjoy of being the subject of
all my experiences, is not distinct from my insertion into the world.
It is a fate for me to be free, to be unable to reduce myself to any¬
thing that I experience, to maintain in relation to any factual situa¬
tion a faculty of withdrawal, and this fate was sealed the moment my
transcendental field was thrown open, when I was born as vision
and knowledge, when I was thrown into the world. Against the social
world I can always avail myself of my sensible nature, close my eyes,
stop up my ears, live as a stranger in society, treat others, ceremonies
and institutions as mere arrangements of colour and light, and strip
them of all their human significance. Against the natural world I
can always have recourse to the thinking nature and entertain doubts
about each perception taken on its own. The truth of solipsism is
there. Every experience will always appear to me as a particular in¬
stance which does not exhaust the generality of my being, and I have
always, as Malebranche said, movement left wherewith to go further.
But I can fly from being only into being; for example, I escape from
society into nature, or from the real world into an imaginary one
made of the broken fragments of reality. The physical and social
world always functions as a stimulus to my reactions, whether these
be positive or negative. I call such and such a perception into ques¬
tion only in the name of a truer one capable of correcting it; in so far
as I can deny each thing, it is always by asserting that there is some¬
thing in general, and this is why we say that thought is a thinking
nature, an assertion of being over and above the negation of beings.

I can evolve a solipsist philosophy but, in doing so, I assume the
existence of a community of men endowed with speech, and I address
myself to it. Even the ‘indefinite refusal to be anything at all’1 as¬
sumes something which is refused and in relation to which the sub¬
ject holds himself apart. I must choose between others and myself, it
is said. But we choose one against the other, and thus assert both.
The other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I
1 Valery, Introduction a la melhode de Leonard de Vinci, Variele, p. 200.

360

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact the
other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if
both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both
make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions
to* be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an
insect’s. This is what happens, for instance, when I fall under the
gaze of a stranger. But even then, the objectification of each by the
other’s gaze is felt as unbearable only because it takes the place of
possible communication. A dog’s gaze directed towards me causes
me no embarrassment. The refusal to communicate, however, is still
a form of communication. Manifold freedom, the thinking nature,
the inalienable core, existence without qualification, which in me
and in others mark the bounds of sympathy, do call a halt to com¬
munication, but do not abolish it. If l am dealing with a stranger who
has as yet not uttered a word, I may well believe that he is an inhabitant
of another world in which my own thoughts and actions are unworthy
of a place. But let him utter a word, or even make a gesture of im¬
patience, and already he ceases to transcend me: that, then, is his
voice, those are his thoughts and that is the realm that I thought
inaccessible. Each existence finally transcends the others only when
it remains inactive and rests upon its natural difference. Even that
universal meditation which cuts the philosopher off from his nation,
his friendships, his prejudices, his empirical being, the world in
short and which seems to leave him in complete isolation, is in
reality an act, the spoken word, and consequently dialogue. Solips¬
ism would be strictly true only of someone who managed to be
tacitly aware of his existence without being or doing anything, which
is impossible, since existing is being in and of the world. The philo¬
sopher cannot fail to draw others with him into his reflective retreat,
because in the uncertainty of the world, he has for ever learned to
treat them as associates , and because all his knowledge is built on
this datum of opinion. Transcendental subjectivity is a revealed
subjectivity, revealed to itself and to others, and is for that reason
an intersubjectivity. As soon as existence collects itself together and
commits itself in some line of conduct, it falls beneath perception.
Like all other perception, this one asserts more things than it grasps;
when I say that I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed
an unfolding of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I
commit a whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know
and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible
core which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of
him. It is subject to this condition that there are things and ‘other
people’ for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a
violent act which is perception itself.

361

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social
world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or
dimension of existence: 1 may well turn away from it, but not cease
to be situated relatively to it. Our relationship to the social is, like
our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception or
any judgement. It is as false to place ourselves in society as an object
among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an
object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the
social as an object. We must return to the social with which we are
in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about
inseparably with us before any objectification. Objective and scienti¬
fic consciousness of the past and of civilizations would be impossible
had I not, through the intermediary of my society, my cultural world
and their horizons, at least a possible communication with them, and
if the place of the Athenian Republic or the Roman Empire were
not somewhere marked out on the borders of my own history, and if
they were not there as so many individuals to be known, indetermin¬
ate but pre-existing, and if I did not find in my own life the basic
structures of history. The social is already there when we come to
know or judge it. An individualistic or sociological philosophy is a
certain perception of co-existence systematized and made explicit.
Prior to the process of becoming aware, the social exists obscurely
and as a summons. At the end of Notre Patrie P<Sguy finds once
again a buried voice which had never ceased to speak, much as we
realize on waking that objects have not, during the night, ceased to
be, or that someone has been knocking for some time at our door
Despite cultural, moral, occupational and ideological differences the
Russian peasants of 1917 joined the workers of Petrograd and Mos¬
cow in the struggle, because they felt that they shared the same fate ■
class was experienced in concrete terms before becoming the object
of a deliberate volition. Primarily the social does not exist as a third
person object. It is the mistake of the investigator, the ‘great man’
and the historian to try to treat it as an object. Fabrice would have
liked to see the Battle of Waterloo as one sees a landscape, but found
nothing but confused episodes. Docs the Emperor really see it on his
map? It reduces itself in his eyes to a general plan by no means free
from gaps; why is this regiment not making headway; why don’t
the reserves come up? The historian who is not engaged in Hie battle
and who sees it from all angles, who brings together a mass of evi¬
dence, and who knows what the result was, thinks lie has grasped
it in its essential truth. But what he gives us is no more than a repre¬
sentation; he does not bring before us the battle itself since the issue
was, at the time, contingent, and is no longer so when the historian
recounts it, since the deeper causes of defeat and the fortuitous inci-

362

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

dents which brought them into play were, in that singular event
called Waterloo, equally determining factors, and since the historian
assigns to the said singular event its place in the general process of
decline of the Empire. The true Waterloo resides neither in what
Fabrice, nor the Emperor, nor the historian sees, it is not a determin¬
able object, it is what occurs on the fringes of all perspectives, and
from which they are all derived.1 The historian and the philosopher
are in search of an objective definition of class or nation: is the
nation based on common language or on conceptions of life; is class
based on income statistics or on its place in the process of pro¬
duction? It is well known that none of these criteria enables us to
decide whether an individual belongs to a nation or a class. In all
revolutions there are members of the privileged class who make
common cause with the revolutionaries, and members of the op¬
pressed class who remain faithful to the privileged. And every nation
has its traitors. This is because the nation and class are neither ver¬
sions of fate which hold the individual in subjection from the outside
nor values which he posits from within. They are modes of co-exis¬
tence which are a call upon him. Under conditions of calm, the
nation and the class are there as stimuli to which I respond only
absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolution¬
ary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those precon-
scious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived
through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment
becomes explicit. But it appears to itself as anterior to decision.

The problem of the existential modality of the social is here at one
with all problems of transcendence. Whether we are concerned with
my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is
always how I can be open to phenomena which transcend me, and
which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and
live them; how the presence to myself {Ur prasenz) which establishes my
own limits and conditions every alien presence is at the same time de¬
presentation (Entgegen wartigung) 2 and throws me outside myself Both

1 It would therefore seem that history should be written in the present tense.
It is what Jules Romains, for example, did in Verdun . Naturally, from the fact
that objective thought is incapable of retailing down to the last detail a present
historical situation, we must not conclude that we should live through our history
with our eyes closed, as if it were an individual adventure, reject every attempt to
put it into perspective, and throw ourselves into action with no guiding principle.
Fabrice misses Waterloo, but the reporter is already nearer to the event, for the
spirit of adventure leads us astray even more than objective thought. There is a
way of thinking, in contact with the event, which seeks its concrete structure.
A revolution which is really moving with the march of history can be thought as
well as lived.

2 Husserl, Die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phdnomenologie , III (unpublished).

363

THE WORLD AS PERCEIVED

idealism and realism, the former by making the external world im¬
manent in me, the latter by subjecting me to a causal action, falsify
the motivational relations existing between the external and internal
worlds, and make this relationship unintelligible. Our individual
past, for example, cannot be given to us either on the one hand by
the actual survival of states of consciousness or paths traced in the
brain, or on the other by a consciousness of the past which consti¬
tutes it and immediately arrives at it: in either case we should lack
any sense of the past, for the past would, strictly speaking, be pre¬
sent. If anything of the past is to exist for us, it can be only, in an
ambiguous presence, anterior to any express evocation, like a field
upon which we have an opening. It must exist for us even though we
may not be thinking of it, and all our recollections must have their
substance in and be drawn from this opaque mass. Similarly, if the
world were to me merely a collection of things, and the thing merely
a collection of properties, I should have no certainties, but merely
probabilities, no unchallengeable reality, but merely conditional
truths. If the. past and the world exist, they must be theoretically
immanent — they can be only what I see behind and around me—
and factually transcendent— they exist in my life before appearing
as objects of my explicit acts. Similarly, moreover, my birth and death
cannot be objects of thought for me. Being established in my life,
buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcen¬
dental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in
v/hich all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a
modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theore-
$ eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life,
neu +he beginning nor the end of which I can experience in
thougn ce it is my living self who think of them, and since thus
my life ah. 1 'forestalls and survives itself. Yet this same thinking
nature which oduces in me a superabundance of being opens the
world to me through a perspective, along with which there comes to
me the feeling of my contingency, the dread of being outstripped,
so that, although I do not manage to encompass my death in thought,
I nevertheless live in an atmosphere of death in general, and there is
a kind of essence of death always on the horizon of my thinking. In
short, just as the instant of my death is a future to which I have not
access, so I am necessarily destined never to experience the presence
of another person to himself. And yet each other person does exist
for me as; an unchallengeable style or setting of co-existence, and
my life has a social atmosphere just as it has a flavour of mor¬
tality.

We haVe discovered, with the natural apd social worlds, the truly
transcendental, which is not the totality pf constituting operations

364

OTHER PEOPLE AND THE HUMAN WORLD

whereby a transparent world, free from obscurity and impenetrable
solidity, is spread out before an impartial spectator, but that am¬
biguous life in which the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung ,
and which, through a fundamental contradiction, puts me ip com¬
munication with them, and on this basis makes knowledge pos¬
sible.1 It will perhaps be maintained that a philosophy cannot be
centred round a contradiction, and that all our descriptions, since
they ultimately defy thought, are quite meaningless. The objection
would be valid if we were content to lay bare, under the term pheno¬
menon or phenomenal field, a layer of prelogical or magical experi¬
ences. For in that case we should have to choose between believing
the descriptions and abandoning thought, or knowing what we are
talking about and abandoning our descriptions. These descriptions
need to provide us with an opportunity of defining a variety of
comprehension and reflection altogether more radical than objec¬
tive thought. To phenomenology understood as direct description
needs to be added a phenomenology of phenomenology. We must
return to the cogito in search of a more fundamental Logos than that
of objective thought, one which endows the latter with its relative
validity, and at the same time assigns to it its place. At the level of
being it will never be intelligible that the subject should be both
naturans and naturatus , infinite and finite. But if we rediscover time
beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of
the body, the world, the thing, and other people, we shall understand
that beyond these there is nothing to understand.

1 Husserl in his last period concedes that all reflection should in the first place
return to the description of the world of living experience ( Lebenswelt ). But he
adds that, by means of a second ‘reduction’, the structures of the world of experi¬
ence must be reinstated in the transcendental flow of a universal constitution in
which all the world’s obscurities are elucidated. It is clear, however, that we are
faced with a dilemma: either the constitution makes the world transparent, in
which case it is not obvious why reflection needs to pass through the world of
experience, or else it retains something of that world, and never rids it of its
opacity. Husserl’s thought moves increasingly in this second direction, despite
many throwbacks to the logicist period — as is seen when he makes a problem of
rationality, when he allows significances which are in the last resort ‘fluid’ ( Erfahr -
ung und Urteil, p. 428), when he bases knowledge on a basic Sofa.

365

PART THREE

Being-for-Itself and Being-in-the-World

• .

THE COGITO

I AM thinking of the Cartesian cogito, wanting to finish this work,
feeling the coolness of the paper under my hand, and perceiving the
trees of the boulevard through the window. My life is constantly
thrown headlong into transcendent things, and passes wholly out¬
side me. The cogito is either this thought which took shape three
centuries ago in the mind of Descartes, or the meaning of the books
he has left for us, or else an eternal truth which emerges from them,
but in any case is a cultural being of which it is true to say that my
thought strains towards it rather than that it embraces it, as my
body, in a familiar surrounding, finds its orientation and makes its
way among objects without my needing to have them expressly in
mind. This book, once begun, is not a certain set of ideas; it con¬
stitutes for me an open situation, for which I could not possibly
provide any complex formula, and in which I struggle blindly on
until, miraculously, thoughts and words become organized by them¬
selves. A fortiori the sensible forms of being which lie around me, the
paper under my hand, the trees before my eyes, do not yield their
secret to me, rather is it that my consciousness takes Sight from itself
and, in them, is unaware of itself. Such is the initial situation that
realism tries to account for by asserting the affective transcendence
and the existence in itself of the world and ideas.

There is, however, no question of justifying realism, and there is
an element of final truth in the Cartesian return of things or ideas
to the self. The very experience of transcendent things is possible
only provided that their project is borne, and discovered, within
myself. When I say that things are transcendent, this means that I do
not possess them, that I do not circumambulate them ; they are trans¬
cendent to the extent that I am ignorant of what they are, and blindly
assert their bare existence. Now what meaning can there be in assert¬
ing the existence of one knows not what? If there can be any truth
at all in this assertion, it is in so far as I catch a glimpse of the nature

369

BEING -EOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

or essence to which it refers, in so far, for instance, as my vision of
the tree as a mute ek-stase into an individual thing already envelops
a certain thought about seeing and a certain thought about the tree.
It is, in short, in so far as I do not merely encounter the tree, am not
simply confronted with it, but discover in this existent before me a
certain nature, the notion of which I actively evolve. In so far as I
find things round about me, this cannot be because they are actually
there, for, ex hypothesis I can know nothing of this factual existence.
The fact that I am capable of recognizing it is attributable to my
actual contact with the thing, which awakens within me a primordial
knowledge of all things, and to my finite and determinate perceptions’
being partial manifestations of a power of knowing which is co¬
extensive with the world and unfolds it in its full extent and depth.
If we imagine a space in itself with which the perceiving subject
contrives to coincide, for example, if I imagine that my hand perceives
the distance between two points as it spans it, how could the angle
formed by my fingers, and indicative of that distance, come to be
judged, unless it were so to speak measured out by the inner opera¬
tion of some power residing in neither object, a power which, ipso
facto , becomes able to know, or rather effect, the relation existing
between them? If it be insisted that the ‘sensation in my thumb’ and
that in my first finger are at any rate ‘signs’ of the distance, how could
these sensations come to have in themselves any means of signifying
the relationship between points in space, unless they were already
situated on a path running from one to the other, and unless this
path in its turn were not only traversed by my fingers as they open,
but also ‘aimed at’ by my thought pursuing its intelligible purpose?
‘How could the mind know the significance of a sign which it has
not itself constituted as a sign?’1 For the picture of knowledge at
which we arrived in describing the subject situated in his world, we
must, it seems, substitute a second, according to which it constructs
or constitutes this world itself, and this one is more authentic than
the first, since the transactions between the subject and the things
round about it are possible only provided that the subject first of all
causes them to exist for itself, actually arranges them round about
itself, and extracts them from its own core. The same applies with
greater force in acts of spontaneous thought. The Cartesian cogito ,
which is the theme of my reflection, is always beyond what I bring
to mind at the moment. It has a horizon of significance made up of
a great number of thoughts which occurred to me as I was reading
Descartes and which are not now present, along with others which
I feel stirring within me, which I might have, but never have de¬
veloped. But the fact that it is enough to utter these three syllables in
1 P. Lachieze-Rey, Reflexions sur Vactivite spirituelie constituante , p. 134.

370

THE COGITO

my presence for me to be immediately directed towards a certain
set of ideas, shows that in some way all possible developments and
clarifications are at once present to me. ‘Whoever tries to limit the
spiritual light to what is at present before the mind always runs up
against the Socratic problem. “How will you set about looking for
that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Which,
among the things you do not know, is the one which you propose to
look for ? And if by chance you should stumble upon it, how will you
know that it is indeed that thing, since you are in ignorance of it?’5
( Meno , 80D.)1 A thought really transcended by its objects would
find them proliferating in its path without ever being able to grasp
their relationships to each other, or finding its way through to their
truth. It is I who reconstitute the historical cogito, I who read Des¬
cartes’ text, I who recognize in it an undying truth, so that finally
the Cartesian cogito acquires its significance only through my own
cogito, and I should have no thought of it, had I not within myself
all that is needed to invent it. It is I who assign to my thought the
objective of resuming the action of the cogito , and I who constantly
verify my thought’s orientation towards this objective, therefore my
thought must forestall itself in the pursuit of this aim, and must al¬
ready have found what it seeks, otherwise it would not seek it. We
must define thought in terms of that strange power which it possesses
of being ahead of itself, of launching itself and being at home every¬
where, in a word, in terms of its autonomy. Unless thought itself had
put into things what it subsequently finds in them, it would have no
hold upon things, would not think of them, and would be an ‘illusion
of thought’.2 A sensible perception or a piece of reasoning cannot
be facts which come about in me and of which I take note. When I
consider them after the event, they are dispersed and distributed each
to its due place. But all this is merely what is left in the wake of
reasoning and perception which, seen contemporaneously, must
necessarily, on pain of ceasing to hang together, take in simul¬
taneously everything necessary to their realization, and consequently
be present to themselves with no intervening distance, in one in¬
divisible intention. All thought of something is at the same time self-
consciousness, failing which it could have no object. At the root of
all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being
which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both
of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by
observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of
itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-conscious¬
ness is the very being of mind in action. The act whereby I am con¬
scious of something must itself be apprehended at the very moment
1 P. Lachi&ze-Rey, VIdealisme kantien , pp. 17-18. 2 Ibid., p. 25.

371

BEING-FOR-ITSFLF AND BEING -IN-THE-WORLD

at which it is carried out, otherwise it would collapse. Therefore it is
inconceivable that it should be triggered off or brought about by
anything whatsoever; it must be causa sui.1 To revert with Descartes
from things to thought about things is to take one of two courses :
it is either to reduce experience to a collection of psychological
events, of which the / is merely the overall name or the hypothetical
cause, in which case it is not clear how my existence is more certain
than that of any thing, since it is no longer immediate, save at a fleet¬
ing instant; or else it is to recognize as anterior to events a field and
a system of thoughts which is subject neither to time nor to any other
limitation, a mode of existence owing nothing to the event and
which is existence as consciousness, a spiritual act which grasps at a
distance and compresses into itself everything at which it aims, an
T think’ which is, by itself and without any adjunct, an ‘I am’.2 ‘The
Cartesian doctrine of the cogito was therefore bound to lead logically
to the assertion of the timelessness of mind, and to the acceptance
of a consciousness of the eternal: experimur nos aeternos esse'*
Accordingly eternity, understood as the power to embrace and anti¬
cipate temporal developments in a single intention, becomes the very
definition of subjectivity.4 *

Before questioning this interpretation of the cogito in terms of eter¬
nity, let us carefully observe whai follows from it, as this will show
the need of some rectification. If the cogito reveals to me a new mode
of existence owing nothing to time, and if I discover myself as the
universal constituent of all being accessible to me, and as a trans¬
cendental field with no hidden comers and no outside, it is not enough
to say that my mind, ‘when it is a question of the form of all the
objects of sense ... is the God of Spinoza’,6 for the distinction be¬
tween form and matter can no longer be given any ultimate value,
therefore it is not clear how the mind, reflecting on itself, could in
the last analysis find any meaning in the notion of receptivity, or
think of itself in any valid way as undergoing modification : for if it is
the mind itself which thinks of itself as affected, it does not think of
itself thus, since it affirms its activity afresh simultaneously with ap¬
pearing to restrict it: in so far, on the other hand, as it is the mind
which places itself in the world, it is not there, and the self-positing
is an illusion. It must then be said, with no qualification, that my
mind is God. How can M. Lachieze-Rey, for example, have avoided
this consequence? ‘If, having suspended thinking, I resume it again,

1 P. Lachieze-Rey, U Idealisme kantien> p. 55.

2 Ibid., p. 184. 3 Ibid., pp. 17-18.

4 P. Lachi£ze-Rcy, Le Moi , le Monde et Dieu , p. 68.

B Kant. 0 her gang, Adickes, p. 756, quoted by Lachieze-Rey, UIdealisme

kantien , p. 464.

372

THE C0G1T0

I return to life, I reconstitute, in its indivisibility, and by putting
myself back at the source whence it flows, the movement which I
carry on. . . . Thus, whenever he thinks, the subject makes himself
his point of support, and takes his place, beyond and behind his
various representations, in that unity which, being the principle of
all recognition, is not there to be recognized, and he becomes once
more the absolute because that is what he eternally is.’1 But how
could there be several absolutes? How in the first place could I ever
recognize other (my)selves? If the sole experience of the subject is
the one which I gain by coinciding with it, if the mind, by definition,
eludes ‘the outside spectator’ and can be recognized only from within,
my cogito is necessarily unique, and cannot be ‘shared in’ by another.
Perhaps we can say that it is ‘transferable’ to others.2 But then how
could such a transfer ever be brought about? What spectacle can
ever validly induce me to posit outside myself that mode of existence
the whole significance of which demands that it be grasped from
within? Unless I learn within myself to recognize the junction of the
for itself and the in itself none of those mechanisms called other
bodies will ever be able to come to life; unless I have an exterior
others have no interior. The plurality of consciousness is impossible
if I have an absolute consciousness of myself. Behind the absolute of
my thought, it is even impossible to conjecture a divine absolute. If it
is perfect, the contact of my thought with itself seals me within my¬
self, and prevents me from ever feeling that anything eludes my
grasp; there is no opening, no ‘aspiration’3 towards an Other for this
self of mine, which constructs the totality of being and its own pres¬
ence in the world, which is defined in terms of ‘self-possession’,4 and
which never finds anything outside itself but what it has put there.
This hermetically sealed self is no longer a finite self. ‘There is , . .
a consciousness of the universe only through the previous conscious¬
ness of organization in the active sense of the word, and conse¬
quently, in the last analysis, only through an inner communion with
the very working of godhead.’6 It is ultimately with God that the
cogito brings me into coincidence. While the intelligible and identi¬
fiable structure of my experience, when recognized by me in the
cogito , draws me out of the event and establishes me in eternity, it
frees me simultaneously from all limiting attributes and, in fact, from
that fundamental event which is my private existence. Hence the
same reasoning which necessarily leads from the event to the act, from
thoughts to the /, equally necessarily leads from the multiplicity

1 P. Lachifcze-Rey, Reflexions sur V activity spirit uelle constiluante , p. 145.

2 Id., VIdialisme kantien, p. 477.

3 Ibid., p. 477. Le Moi, le Monde et Dieu , p. 83.

4 UIdealisme kantien , p. 472. 5 Le Moi , le Monde et Dieu , p. 33.

373

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING -IN-THE-WORLD

of 7’s to one sole constituting consciousness, and prevents me
from entertaining any vain hope of salvaging the finiteness of the
subject by defining it as a ‘monad’.1 The constituting consciousness
is necessarily unique and universal. If we try to maintain that what it
constitutes in each one of us is merely a microcosm, if we keep, for
the cogito, the meaning of ‘existential experience’, 8 and if it reveals
to me, not the absolute transparency of thought wholly in possession
of itself, but the blind act by which I take up my destiny as a think¬
ing nature and follow it out, then we are introducing another philo¬
sophy, which does not take us out of time. What is brought home to
us here is the need to find a middle course between eternity and the
atomistic time of empiricism, in order to resume the interpretation
of the cogito and of time. We have seen once and for all that our
relations with things cannot be eternal ones, nor our consciousness of
ourself the mere recording of psychic events. We perceive a world
only provided that, before being facts of which we take cognizance,
that world and that perception are thoughts of our own. What re¬
mains to be understood precisely is the way the world comes to
belong to the subject and the subject to himself, which is that
cogitatio which makes experience possible; our hold on things and
on our ‘states of consciousness’. We shall see that this does not leave

tile cVeiit and time Out of aCCGUHt,

mental mode of the event and Geschichte , from which objective and
impersonal events are derived forms, and finally that any recourse
we have to eternity is necessitated solely by an objective conception

of time.

There can therefore be no doubt at all that I think. I am not sure
that there is over there an ash-tray or a pipe, but I am sure that I
think I see an ash-tray or a pipe. Now is it in fact as easy as is gener¬
ally thought to dissociate these two assertions and hold, indepen¬
dently of any judgement concerning the thing seen, the evident cer¬
tainty of my ‘thought about seeing’? On the contrary, it is impos¬
sible. Perception is precisely that kind of act in which there can be no
question of setting the act itself apart from the end to which it is
directed, Perception and the percept necessarily have the same exis¬
tential modality, since perception is inseparable from the conscious¬
ness which it has, or rather is, of reaching the thing itself. Any con-
tention that the perception is indubitable, whereas the thing per¬
ceived is not, must be ruled out. If I see an ash-tray, in the full sense
of the word see, there must be an ash-tray there, and I cannot forego
this assertion. To see is to see something. To see red, is actively to see
red in existence. Vision can be reduced to the mere presumption of

1 As does M. Lachieze-Rey, Le Moi , le Monde et Dieu, pp. 69-70.

2 Ibid., p. 72.

374

THE COG1TO

seeing only if it is represented as the contemplation of a shifting and
anchorless quale. But if, as we have shown above, the very quality
itself, in its specific texture, is the suggestion of a certain way of exist¬
ing put to us, and responded to by us, in so far as we have sensory
fields; and if the perception of a colour, endowed with a definite
structure (in the way of superficial colour or area of colour), at a
place or distance away either definite or vague, presupposes our
opening on to a reality or a world, how can we possibly dissociate
the certainty of our perceptual existence from that of its external
counterpart? It is of the essence of my vision to refer not only to an
alleged visible entity, but also to a being actually seen. Similarly, if I
feel doubts about the presence of the thing, this doubt attaches to
vision itself, and if there is no red or blue there, I say that I have not
really seen these colours, and concede that at no time has there been
created that parity between my visual intentions and the visible
which constitutes the genuine act of seeing. We are therefore faced
with a choice: either I enjoy no certainty with regard to things them¬
selves, in which case neither can I be certain about my own percep¬
tion, taken as a mere thought, since, taken even in this way, it in¬
volves the assertion of a thing. Or else I grasp my thought with cer¬
tainty, which involves the simultaneous assumption of the existence
towards which it is projected. When Descartes tells us that the exis¬
tence of visible things is doubtful, but that our vision, when con¬
sidered as a mere thought of seeing is not in doubt, he takes up an
untenable position. For thought about seeing can have two meanings.
It can in the first place be understood in the restricted sense of alleged
vision, or ‘the impression of seeing’, in which case it offers only the
certainty of a possibility or a probability, and the ‘thought of seeing’
implies that we have had, in certain cases, the experience of genuine
or actual vision to which the idea of seeing bears a resemblance and
in which the certainty of the thing was, on those occasions, involved.
The certainty of a possibility is no more than the possibility of a
certainty, the thought of seeing is no more than seeing mentally, and
we could not have any such thought unless we had on other oc¬
casions really seen. Now we may understand ‘thought about seeing’
as the consciousness we have of our constituting power. Whatever be
the case with our empirical perceptions, which may be true or false,
these perceptions are possible only if they are inhabited by a mind
able to recognize, identify and sustain before us their intentional
object. But if this constituting power is not a myth, if perception
is really the mere extension of an inner dynamic power with which I
can coincide, my certainty concerning the transcendental premises of
the world must extend to the world itself, and, my vision being in its
entirety thought about seeing, then the thing seen is in itself what I

375

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

think about it, so that transcendental idealism becomes absolute
realism. It would be contradictory to assert1 both that the world is
constituted by me and that, out of this constitutive operation, I can
grasp no more than the outline and the essential structures; I must
see the existing world appear at the end of the constituting process,
and not only the world as an idea, otherwise I shall have no more
than an abstract construction, and not a concrete consciousness, of
the world. Thus, in whatever sense we take Thought about seeing’, it
is certain only so long as actual sight is equally so. When Descartes
tells us that sensation reduced to itself is always true, and that error
creeps in through the transcendent interpretation of it that judge¬
ment provides, he makes an unreal distinction: it is no less difficult
for me to know whether or not I have felt something than it is to
know whether there is really something there, for the victim of
hysteria feels yet does not know what it is that he feels, as he per¬
ceives external objects without being aware of that perception. When,
on the other hand, I am sure of having felt, the certainty of some
external thing is involved in the very way in which the sensation is
articulated and unfolded before me: it is a pain in the leg , or it is red,
and this may be an opaque red on one plane, or a reddish three-
dimensional atmosphere. The ‘interpretation’ of my sensations which
I give must necessarily be motivated, and be so only in terms of the
structure of those sensations, so that it can be said with equal validity
either that there is no transcendent interpretation and no judgement
which does not spring from the very configuration of the phenomena
— or that there is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my
consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.
The acts of the I are of such a nature that they outstrip themselves
leaving no inferiority of consciousness. Consciousness is transcen¬
dence through and through, not transcendence undergone — we have
already said that such a transcendence would bring consciousness to
a stop — but active transcendence. The consciousness I have of seeing
or feeling is no passive noting of some psychic event hermetically
sealed upon itself, an event leaving me in doubt about the reality of
the thing seen or felt. Nor is it the activation of some constituting
power superlatively and eternally inclusive of every possible sight or
sensation, and linking up with the object without ever having to be
drawn away from itself. It is the actual effecting of vision. I reassure

1 As Husserl, for example, does when he concedes that any transcendental re¬
duction is at the same time an eidetic one. The necessity of proceeding by essences,
and the stubborn opacity of existences, cannot be taken for granted as facts, but
contribute to determining the significance of the cogito and of ultimate subjec¬
tivity. I am not a constituting thought, and my ‘I think’ is not an ‘I am’, unless
by thought I can equal the world’s concrete richness, and re-absorb facticity
into it.

376

THE COGITO

myself that I see by seeing this or that, or at least by bringing to life
around me a visual surrounding, a visible world which is ultimately
vouched for only by the sight of a particular thing. Vision is an
action, not, that is, an eternal operation (which is a contradiction in
terms) but an operation which fulfils more than it promises, which
constantly outruns its premises and is inwardly prepared only by my
primordial opening upon a field of transcendence, that is, once again,
by an ek-stase . Sight is achieved and fulfils itself in the thing seen.
It is of its essence to take a hold upon itself, and indeed if it did not
do so it would not be the sight of anythiug, but it is none the less of
its essence to take a hold upon itself in a kind of ambiguous and
obscure way, since it is not in possession of itself and indeed escapes
from itself into the thing seen. What I discover and recognize
through the cogito is not psychological immanence, the inherence of
all phenomena in ‘private states of consciousness’, the blind contact
of sensation with itself. It is not even transcendental immanence,
the belonging of all phenomena to a constituting consciousness, the
possession of clear thought by itself. It is the deep-seated momentum
of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact
with my own being and with the world’s being.

And yet is not the case of perception a special one? It throws me
open to a world, but can do so only by outrunning both me and it¬
self. Thus the perceptual ‘synthesis’ has to be incomplete ; it cannot
present me with a ‘reality’ otherwise than by running the risk of
error. It is absolutely necessarily the case that the thing, if it is to be
a thing, should have sides of itself hidden from me, which is why the
distinction between appearance and reality straightway has its place
in the perceptual ‘synthesis’. It would seem, on the other hand, that
consciousness comes back into its rights and into full possession of
itself, if I consider my awareness of ‘psychic facts’. For example, love
and will are inner operations; they forge their own objects, and it is
clear that in doing so they may be sidetracked from reality and, in
that sense, mislead us ; but it seems impossible that they should mis¬
lead us about themselves. From the moment I feel love, joy or sad¬
ness, it is the case that I love, that I am joyful or sad, even when the
object does not in fact (that is, for others or for myself at other times)
have the value that I now attribute to it. Appearance is* within me,
reality, and the being of consciousness consists in appearing to itself.
What is willing, if it is not being conscious of an object as valid (or as
valid precisely in so far as it is invalid, in the case of perverse will),
and what is loving other than being conscious of an object as lov^
able? And since the consciousness of an object necessarily involves a
knowledge of itself, without which it would escape from itself and
fail even to grasp its object, to will and to know that one wills, to

377

BEING-FOR-1TSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

love and know one loves are one arid the same act; love is conscious¬
ness of loving, will is consciousness of willing. A love or a will un¬
aware of itself would be an unloving love, or an unwilling will, as an
unconscious thought would be an unthinking one. Will or love
would seem to be the same whether their object be artificial or real
and, considered independently of the object to which they actually
refer, they would appear to constitute a sphere of absolute certainty
in which truth cannot elude us. Everything is, then, truth within con¬
sciousness. There can never be illusion other than with regard to the
external object, A feeling, considered in itself, is always true once it is
felt. Let us, however, look at the matter more closely.

It is, in the first place, quite clear that we are able to discriminate,
within ourselves, between ‘true’ and ‘false’ feelings, that everything
felt by us as within ourselves is not ipso facto placed on a single foot¬
ing of existence, or true in the same way, and that there are degrees of
reality within us as there are, outside of us, ‘reflections’, ‘phantoms’
and ‘things’. Besides true love, there is false or illusory love. This last
case must be distinguished from misinterpretations, and those errors
in which I have deceitfully given the name of love to emotions un¬
worthy of it. For in such cases there was never even a semblance of
love, and never for a moment did I believe that my life was com¬
mitted to that feeling. I conspired with myself to avoid asking the
question in order to avoid receiving the reply which was already
known to me; my ‘love’-making was an attempt to do what was ex¬
pected of me, or merely deception. In mistaken or illusory love, on
the other hand, I was willingly united to the loved one, she was for a
time truly the vehicle of my relationships with the world. When I told
her that I loved her, I was not ‘interpreting’, for my life was in truth
committed to a form which, like a melody, demanded to be carried
on. It is true that, following upon disillusionment (the revelation of
my illusion about myself ), and when I try to understand what has
happened to me, I shall find beneath this supposed love something
other than love: the likeness of the ‘loved’ woman to another, or
boredom, or force of habit, or a community of interests or of con¬
victions, and it is just this which will justify me in talking about
illusion. I loved only qualities (that smile that is so like another smile,
that beauty which asserts itself like a fact, that youthfulness of ges¬
ture and behaviour) and not the individual manner of being which
is that person herself. And, correspondingly, I was not myself wholly
in thrall, for areas of my past and future life escaped the invasion,
and I maintained within me corners set aside for other things. In that
case, it will be objected, I was either unaware of this, in which case it
is not a question of illusory love, but of a true love which is dying —
or else I did know, in which case there was never any love at all, even

378

THE COGITO

‘mistaken’. But neither is the case. It cannot be said that this love,
while it lasted, was indistinguishable from true love, and that it be¬
came ‘mistaken love’ when I repudiated it. Nor can it be said that a
mystical crisis at fifteen is without significance, and that it becomes ,
when independently evaluated in later life, an incident of puberty
or the first signs of a religious vocation. Even if I reconstruct my
whole life on the basis of some incident of puberty, that incident does
not lose its contingent character, so that it is my whole life which is
‘mistaken’. In the mystical crisis itself as I experienced it, there must
be discoverable in it some characteristic which distinguishes vocation
from incident: in the first case the mystical attitude insinuates itself
into my basic relationship to the world and other people; in the
second case, it is within the subject as an impersonal form of be¬
haviour, devoid of inner necessity: ‘puberty’. In the same way, true
love summons all the subject’s resources and concerns him in his
entire being, whereas mistaken love touches on only one persona:
‘the man of forty’ in the case of late love, ‘the traveller’ in the case of
exotic appeal, ‘the widower’ if the misguided love is sustained by a
memory, ‘the child’ where the mother is recalled. True love ends
when I change, or when the object of affection changes; misguided
love is revealed as such when I return to my own self. The difference
is intrinsic. But as it concerns the place of feeling in my total being-in-
the-world, and as mistaken love is bound up with the person I believe
I am at the time I feel it, and also as, in order to discern its mistaken
nature I require a knowledge of myself which I can gain only through
disillusionment, ambiguity remains, which is why illusion is possible.

Let us return to the example of the hysterical subject. It is easy to
treat him as a dissembler, but his deception is primarily self-decep¬
tion, and this instability once more poses the problem we are trying
to dispose of: how can the victim of hysteria not feel what he feels,
and feel what he does not feel? He does not feign pain, sadness or
anger, yet his fits of ‘pain’, ‘sadness’ or ‘rage’ are distinguishable from
‘real’ cases of these afflictions, because he is not wholly given over
to them; at his core there is left a zone of tranquillity. Illusory or
imaginary feelings are genuinely experienced, but experienced, so
to speak, on the outer fringes of ourselves.1 Children and many
grown people are under the sway of ‘situational values’, which con¬
ceal from them their actual feelings — they are pleased because they
have been given a present, sad because they are at a funeral, gay or
sad according to the countryside around them, and, on the hither
side of any such emotions, indifferent and neutral. ‘We experience
the feeling itself keenly, but inauthentically. It is as it were, the
shadow of an authentic sentiment.’ Our natural attitude is not to
1 Scheler, Idole der Selbsterkenntis , pp. 63 and ff.

379

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

experience our own feelings or to adhere to our own pleasures, but to
live in accordance with the emotional categories of the environment.
The girl who is loved does not project her emotions like an Isolde
or a Juliet, but feels the feelings of these poetic phantoms and infuses
them into her own life. It is at a later date, perhaps, that a personal
and authentic feeling breaks the web of her sentimental phantasies.’1
But until this feeling makes its appearance, the girl has no means of
discovering the illusory and literary element in her love. It is the
truth of her future feelings which is destined to reveal the mis-
guidedness of her present ones, which are genuinely experienced. The
girl ‘loses her reality’2 in them as does the actor in the part he plays,
so that we are faced, not with representations or ideas which give
rise to real emotions, but artificial emotions and imaginary senti¬
ments. Thus we are not perpetually in possession of ourselves in our
whole reality, and we are justified in speaking of an inner perception,
of an inward sense, an ‘analyser’ working from us to ourselves which,
ceaselessly, goes some, but not all, the way in providing knowledge of
our life and our being. What remains on the hither side of inner per¬
ception and makes no impression on the inward sense is not an un¬
conscious. ‘My life’, my ‘total being’, like the ‘deep-seated self’ of
Bergson, are not dubious constructs, but phenomena which are in¬
dubitably revealed to reflection. It is simply a question of what we do.
I make the discovery that I am in love. It may be that none of those
fabts, -which I now recognize as proof of my love, passed unnoticed by
me; neither the quickened drive of my present towards my future, nor
that emotion which left me speechless, nor my impatience for the
arrival of the day we were to meet. Nevertheless I had not seen the
thing as a whole, or, if I had, I did not realize that it was a matter of
so important a feeling, for I now discover that I can no longer con¬
ceive my life without this love. Going back over the preceding days
and months, I am made aware that my thoughts and actions were
polarized, I pick out the course of a process of organization, a syn¬
thesis in the making . Yet it is impossible to pretend that I always
knew what I now know, and to see as existing, during the months
which have elapsed, a self-knowledge which I have only just come
by. In the most general way, it is impossible to deny that I have much
to learn about myself, as it is to anticipate, in the very heart of me, a
self-knowledge inclusive in advance of all that I am later destined to
know of myself, after I have read books and had experiences at pres¬
ent unsuspected by me. The idea of a form of consciousness which is
transparent to itself, its existence being identifiable with its aware¬
ness of existing, is not so very different from the notion of the uncon-

1 Scheler, Mole der Selbsterkenntis , pp. 89-95.

2 J. P. Sartre, Ulmaginaire, p. 243.

380

THE COGITO

scious: in both cases we have the same retrospective illusion, since
there is, introduced into me as an explicit object, everything that I
am later to learn concerning myself. The love which worked out its
dialectic through me, and of which I have just become aware, was
not, from the start, a thing hidden in my unconscious, nor was it an
object before my consciousness, but the impulse carrying me towards
someone, the transmutation of my thoughts and behaviour — I was
not unaware of it since it was I who endured the hours of boredom
preceding a meeting, and who felt elation when she approached— it
was a matter of experience, not knowledge, from start to finish. The
lover is not unlike the dreamer. The ‘latent content’ and the ‘sexual
significance’ of the dream are undoubtedly present to the dreamer
since it is he who dreams his dream. But, precisely because sexuality
is the general atmosphere of the dream, these elements are not the-
matized as sexual, for want of any non-sexual background against
which they may stand out. When we ask ourselves whether or not the
dreamer is conscious of the sexual content of his dream, we are really
asking the wrong question. If sexuality, as we have explained above,
is indeed one of our ways of entering into a relationship with the
world, then whenever our meta-sexual being is overshadowed, as
happens in dreams, sexuality is everywhere and nowhere; it is, in the
nature of the case, ambiguous and cannot emerge clearly as itself. The
fire which figures in the dream is not, for the dreamer, a way of dis¬
guising the sexual drive beneath an acceptable symbol, since it is only
in the waking state that it appears as a symbol; in the language of
dreams, fire is the symbol of the sexual drive because the dreamer,
being removed from the physical world and the inflexible context of
waking life, uses imagery only in proportion as it has affective value.
The sexual significance of the dream is neither unconscious nor ‘con¬
scious’, because the dream does not ‘signify’, as does waking life, by
relating one order of facts to another, and it is as great a mistake to
see sexuality as crystallized in ‘unconscious representations’ as it is to
see lodged in the depths of the dreamer a consciousness which calls
it by its true name. Similarly, for the lover whose experience it is, love
is nameless; it is not a thing capable of being circumscribed and de¬
signated, nor is it the love spoken of in books and newspapers, be¬
cause it is the way in which he establishes his relations with the
world; it is an existential significance. The criminal fails to see his
crime, and the traitor his betrayal for what they are, not because they
exist deeply embedded within him as unconscious representations
or tendencies, but because they are so many relatively closed worlds,
so many situations. If we are in a situation, we are circumvented and
cannot be transparent to ourselves, so that our contact with our¬
selves is necessarily achieved only in the sphere of ambiguity.

381

BEING-FOR-1TSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

But have we not overshot our mark? If illusion is possible in con¬
sciousness on some occasions, will it not be possible on all occasions ?
We said that there are imaginary sentiments to which we are com¬
mitted sufficiently for them to be experienced, but insufficiently for
them to be authentic. But are there any absolute commitments ? Is it
not of the essence of commitment to leave unimpaired the autonomy
of the person who commits himself, in the sense that it is never com¬
plete, and does it not therefore follow that we have no longer any
means of describing certain feelings as authentic? To define the sub¬
ject in terms of existence, that is to say, in terms of a process in which
he transcends himself, is surely by that very act to condemn him to
illusion, since he will never be able to be anything. Through refrain¬
ing, in consciousness, from defining reality in terms of appearance,
have we not severed the links binding us to ourselves, and reduced
consciousness to the status of a mere appearance of some intangible
reality ? Are we not faced with the dilemma of an absolute conscious¬
ness on the one hand and endless doubt on the other ? And have we
not by our rejection of the first solution, made the cogito impossible?
This objection brings us to the crucial point. It is true neither that
my existence is in full possession of itself, nor that it is entirely
estranged from itself, because it is action or doing, and because
action is, by definition, the violent transition from what I have to
what I aim to have, from what I am to what I intend to be. I can
effect the cogito arid be assured of genuinely willing, loving or believ¬
ing, provided that in the first place I actually do will, love or believe,
and thus fulfil my own existence. If this were not so, an ineradicable
doubt would spread over the world, and equally over my own
thoughts. I should be for ever wondering whether my ‘tastes’,
‘volitions’, ‘desires’ and 'ventures’ were really mine, for they would
always seem artificial, unreal and unfulfilled. But then this doubt, not
being an actual doubt, could no longer even manage to confer the
absolute certainty of doubting.1 The only way out and into ‘sin¬
cerity’, is through the silencing of such scruples and taking a blind
plunge into ‘doing’. Hence it is not because I think I am that I am
certain of my existence ; on the contrary the certainty I enjoy concern¬
ing my thoughts stems from their genuine existence. My love, hatred
and will are not certain as mere thoughts about loving, hating and
willing; on the contrary the whole certainty of these thoughts is
owed to that of the acts of love, hatred or will of which I am quite

1 . in which case, that too, that cynical distaste at her own persona, was

deliberately put on! And that scorn for the distaste which she was busy con¬
triving, was so much play-acting too ! And her doubt about her scorn ... it was
maddening. Once you started being sincere, was there no end to it?’ S. de Beau¬
voir, VImitiei p. 232.

382

THE COGITO

sure because I perform them. All inner perception is inadequate be¬
cause I am not an object that can be perceived, because I make my
reality and find myself only in the act. ‘I doubt’ : there is no way of
silencing all doubt concerning this proposition other than by actually
doubting, involving oneself in the experience of doubting, and thus
bringing this doubt into existence as the certainty of doubting. To
doubt is always to doubt something, even if one ‘doubts everything’.
I am certain of doubting precisely because I take this or that thing, or
even every thing and my own existence too, as doubtful. It is through
my relation to ‘things’ that I know myself; inner perception follows
afterwards, and would not be possible had I not already made con¬
tact with my doubt in its very object. What has been said of external
can equally be said of internal perception: that it involves infinity,
that it is a never-ending synthesis which, though always incomplete,
is nevertheless self-affirming. If I try to verify my perception of the
ash-tray, my task will be endless, for this perception takes for granted
more than I can know in an explicit way. Similarly, if I try to verify
the reality of my doubt, I shall again be launched into an infinite re¬
gress, for I shall need to call into question my thought about doubt¬
ing, then the thought about that thought, and so on. The certainty
derives from the doubt itself as an act, and not from these thoughts,
just as the certainty of the thing and of the world precedes any
thetic knowledge of their properties. It is indeed true, as has been
said, that to know is to know that one knows, not because this second
order of knowing guarantees knowledge itself, but the reverse. I can¬
not reconstruct the thing, and yet there are perceived things. In the
same way I can never coincide with my life which is for ever fleeing
from itself, in spite of which there are inner perceptions. For the same
reason I am open to both illusion and truth about myself: that is,
there are acts in which I collect myself together in order to surpass
myself. The cogito is the recognition of this fundamental fact. In the
proposition: T think, I am’, the two assertions are to be equated
with each other, otherwise there would be no cogito . Nevertheless
we must be clear about the meaning of this equivalence : it is not the
T am’ which is pre-eminently contained in the ‘I think,’ not my exis¬
tence which is brought down to the consciousness which I have of it,
but conversely the ‘I think,’ which is re-integrated into the transcend¬
ing process of the ‘I am’, and consciousness into existence.

It is true that it seems necessary to concede my absolute coinci¬
dence with myself, if not in the case of will and feeling, at least in
acts of ‘pure thought’. If this were the case, all that we have said
would appear to be challenged, so that, far from appearing as a mere
manner of existence, thought would truly monopolize us. We must
now, therefore, consider the understanding. I think of the triangle,

383

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING -IN-THE- WORLD

the three-dimensional space to which it is supposed to belong, the
extension of one of its sides, and the line that can be drawn through
its apex parallel to the opposite side, and I perceive that this line,
with the apex, forms three angles the sum of which is equal to the
sum of the angles of the triangle, and equal, moreover, to two right
angles. I am sure of the result which I regard as proved; which
means that my diagrammatic construction is not, as are the strokes
arbitrarily added by the child to his drawing, each one of which com¬
pletely transforms its meaning (‘it’s a house; no, it’s a boat; no,
it’s a man’), a collection of lines fortuitously drawn by my hand.
The process from start to finish has a triangle in view. The genesis of
the figure is not only a real genesis, but an intelligible one; I make
my construction according to rules, and cause properties to make
their appearance in the figure — properties which are relations belong¬
ing to the essence of the triangle. I do not, like the child, reproduce
those suggested by the ill-defined figure which is actually there on the
paper. I am aware of presenting a proof, because I perceive a neces¬
sary link between the collection of data which constitute the hypo¬
thesis and the conclusion which I draw from them. It is this necessity
which ensures that I shall be able to repeat the operation with an
indefinite number of empirical figures, and the necessity itself stems
from the fact that at each step in my demonstration, and each time
I introduced new relationships, I remained conscious of the triangle
as a stable structure conditioned, and left intact, by them. This is
why we can say, if we want, that the proof consists in bringing the
sum of the angles constructed into two different groupings, and see¬
ing that sum alternately as equal to the sum of the angles of the tri¬
angle, and equal to two right angles,1 but it must be added2 that here
we have not merely two successive configurations, the first of which
eliminates the second (as is the case with the child sketching dreamily) ;
the first survives for me while the second is in process of establishing
itself, the sum of angles which I equate with two right angles is the
same as I elsewhere equate with the sum of the angles of the triangle,
all of which is possible only provided that I go beyond the order of
phenomena or appearances and gain access to that of the eidos or of
being. Truth would seem to be impossible unless one enjoys an ab¬
solute self-possession in active thought, failing which it would be
unable to unfold in a set of successive operations, and to produce a
permanently valid result.

There would be neither thought nor truth but for an act whereby I

1 Wertheimer, Drei Abhandlungen zur Gestalttheorie: die Schluszprozesse im
produktiven Denken .

2 A. Gurwitsch, Quelques aspects et quelques developpements de la theorie de la
For me y p, 460.

384

THE COC.ITO

prevail over the temporal dispersal of the phases of thought, and the
mere de facto existence of my mental events. The important thing,
however, is fully to understand the nature of this act. The necessity
of the proof is not an analytic necessity : the construction which en¬
ables the conclusion to be reached is not really contained in the
essence of the triangle, but merely possible when that essence serves
as a starting point. There is no definition of a triangle which includes
in advance the properties subsequently to be demonstrated and the
intermediate steps leading to that demonstration. Extending one side,
drawing through the apex a line parallel to the opposite side, intro¬
ducing the theorem relating to parallels and their secant, these steps
are possible only if I consider the triangle itself as it is drawn on the
paper, on the blackboard or in the imagination, with its physiognomy,
the concrete arrangement of its lines, in short its Gestalt . Is not pre¬
cisely this the essence or the idea of a triangle? Let us, at the outset,
reject any idea of a formal essence of the triangle. Although attempts
at formalization may be conceived, it is in any case quite certain that
they lay no claim to provide a logic of invention, and that no logical
definition of a triangle could rival, for abundant variety, the actual
sight of the figure, or enable us to reach, through a series of formal
operations, conclusions not already established by the aid of in¬
tuition. This, it will perhaps be objected, touches only on the
psychological circumstances of discovery, so that in so far as, after
the event, it is possible to establish, between the hypothesis and the
conclusion, a link owing nothing to intuition, it is because intuition is
not the inevitable mediator of thought and has no place in logic. But
the fact that formalization is always retrospective proves that it is
never otherwise than apparently complete, and that formal thought
feeds on intuitive thought. It reveals those unformulated axioms on
which reason is said to rest, and seems to bring to reason a certain
added rigour and to uncover the very foundations of our certainty;
but in reality the place in which certainty arises and in which a truth
makes its appearance is always intuitive thought, even though, or
rather precisely because , the principles are tacitly assumed there.
There would be no experience of truth, and nothing would quench
our ‘mental volubility’ if we thought vi formae , and if formal rela¬
tions were not first presented to us crystallized in some particular
thing. We should not even be able to settle on a hypothesis from
which to deduce the consequences, if we did not first hold it to be true.
A hypothesis is what is presumed to be true, so that hypothetical
thinking presupposes some experience of de facto truth. The con¬
struction relates, then, to the configuration of the triangle, to the
way in which it occupies space, to the relations expressed by the
words ‘on’, ‘by’, ‘apex’ and ‘extend’. Do these relations constitute a

385

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

kind of material essence of the triangle? If the words ‘on’, ‘through’,
etc., are to retain any meaning, it is in virtue of my working on a per¬
ceptible or imaginary triangle, that is to say, one which is at least
potentially situated in my perceptual field, orientated in relation to
‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘right’ and ‘left’, or again, as we pointed out earlier,
implied in my general grip upon the world. The construction makes
explicit the possibilities of the triangle, considered not in the light of
its definition and as a pure idea, but as a configuration and as the
pole towards which my movements are directed. The conclusion
follows of necessity from the hypothesis because, in the act of con¬
structing, the geometer has already experienced the possibility of the
transition. Let us try to give a better description of this act. We have
seen that what occurs is clearly not a purely manual operation, the
actual movement of my hand and pen over the paper, for in that case
there would be no difference between a construction and any arbi¬
trary set of strokes, and no demonstration would accrue. The con¬
struction is a gesture, which means that the actual lines drawn arc the
outward expression of an intention. But then what is this intention ?
I ‘consider’ the triangle, which is for me a set of lines with a certain
orientation, and if words such as ‘angle’ or ‘direction’ have any
meaning for me, it is in so far as I place myself at a point, and from
it tend towards another point, in so far as the system of spatial posi¬
tions provides me with a field of possible movements. Thus do I grasp
the concrete essence of the triangle, which is not a collection of ob¬
jective ‘characteristics’, but the formula of an attitude, a certain
modality of my hold on the world, a structure, in short. When I add
a construction, I commit the first structure to a second one, the
‘parallels and secant’ structure. How is that possible? It is because
my perception of the triangle was not, so to speak, fixed and dead,
for the drawing of the triangle on the paper was merely its outer
covering; it was traversed by lines of force, and everywhere in it new
directions not traced out yet possible came to light. In so far as the
triangle was implied in my hold on the world, it was bursting with
indefinite possibilities of which the construction actually drawn was
merely one. It possesses a demonstrative value because I cause it to
emerge from the dynamic formula of the triangle. It expresses my
power to make apparent the sensible symbols of a certain hold on
things, which is my perception of the triangle’s structure. It is an act
of the productive imagination and not a return to the eternal idea of
the triangle. Just as the localization of objects in space, according to
Kant himself, is not merely a mental operation, but one which utilizes
the body’s motility,1 movement arranging sensations at the particular

1 P. Lachitee-Rey, Utilisation possible du schematisme kantien pour une thiorie
de la perception and Reflexions sur I'activite spirituelle constituante.

386

THE COGITO

point on its trajectory at which those sensations are produced, so the
geometer, who, generally speaking, studies the objective laws of
location, knows the relationships with which he is concerned only
by describing them, at least potentially, with his body. The subject
of geometry is a motor subject. This means in the first place that our
body is not an object, nor is its movement a mere change of place in
objective space, otherwise the problem would be merely shifted, and
the movement of one’s own body would shed no light on the prob¬
lem of the location of things, since it would be itself nothing but a
thing. There must be, as Kant conceded, a ‘motion which generates
space’1 which is our intentional motion, distinct from ‘motion in
space’, which is that of things and of our passive body. But there is
more to be said : if motion is productive of space, we must rule out the
possibility that the body’s motility is a mere ‘instrument’2 for the
constituting consciousness. If there is a constituting consciousness,
then bodily movement is movement only in so far as that conscious¬
ness thinks of it in that light;8 the constructive power rediscovers in
it only what it has put there, and the body is not even an instrument
in this respect: it is an object among objects. There is no psychology
in a philosophy of constituting consciousness. Or at least there can
be nothing valid for such a psychology to say, for it can do nothing
but apply the results of analytical reflection to each particular con¬
tent, while nevertheless distorting them, since it deprives them of their
transcendental significance. The body’s motion can play a part in the
perception of the world only if it is itself an original intentionality, a
manner of relating itself to the distinct object of knowledge. The
world around us must be, not a system of objects which we synthesize,
but a totality of things, open to us, towards which we project our¬
selves. The ‘motion which generates space’ does not deploy the tra¬
jectory from some metaphysical point with no position in the real
world, but from a certain here towards a certain yonder, which are
necessarily interchangeable. The project towards motion is an act,
which means that it traces out the spatio-temporal distance by actu¬
ally covering it. The geometer’s thought, in so far as it is necessarily
sustained by this act, does not, therefore, coincide with itself : it is
purely and simply transcendence. In so far as, by adding a construc¬
tion, I can bring to light the properties of a triangle, and yet find that
the figure thus transformed does not cease to be the same figure as I
began with, and in so far, moreover, as I am able to effect a synthesis
retaining the character of necessity, this is not because my construction

1 Lachieze-Rey, Reflexions sur Vactivitd spirituelle const itucmte , p. 132.

a Lachi&ze-Rey, Utilisation possible . . p. 7.

3 ‘It must disclose intrinsically the immanence of a spatial trajectory, which
alone can enable it to be thought of as motion’. Lachi&ze-Rey, ibid., p. 6.

387

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

is upheld by a concept of the triangle in which all its properties
are included, or because, starting from perceptual consciousness, I
arrive at the eidos: it is because I perform the synthesis of the new
property by means of my body, which immediately implants me in
space, while its autonomous motion enables me, through a series of
definite procedures, to arrive once more at an all-inclusive view of
space. Far from its being the case that geometrical thinking trans¬
cends perceptual consciousness, it is from the world of perception
that I borrow the notion of essence. I believe that the triangle has
always had, and always will have, angles the sum of which equals
two right angles, as well as all the other less obvious properties which
geometry attributes to it, because I have had the experience of a
real triangle, and because, as a physical thing, it necessarily has
within itself everything that it has ever been able, or ever will be able,
to display. Unless the thing perceived had for ever implanted within
us the ideal notion of being which is what it is, there would be no
phenomenon of being, and mathematical thought would appear to us
in the light of a creative activity. What I call the essence of the
triangle is nothing but this presumption of a completed synthesis, in
terms of which we have defined the thing.

Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the ex¬
tent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view
itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only
of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all
acquired views which constitute the cultural world. When we say
that thought is spontaneous, this does not mean that it coincides
with itself; on the contrary it means that it outruns itself, and speech
is precisely that act through which it immortalizes itself as truth. It is,
indeed, obvious that speech cannot be regarded as a mere clothing
for thought, or expression as the translation, into an arbitrary system
of symbols, of a meaning already clear to itself. We repeat that sounds
and phonemes have no meaning in themselves, and that all our con¬
sciousness can find in language is what it has put there. But it would
follow from this that language can teach us nothing, and that it can
at the most arouse in us new combinations of those meanings already
possessed by us. But this is just what the experience of language re¬
futes. It is true that communication presupposes a system of corre¬
spondences such as the dictionary provides, but it goes beyond these,
and what gives its meaning to each word is the sentence. It is because
it has been used in various contexts that the word gradually accu¬
mulates a significance which it is impossible to establish absolutely.
A telling utterance or a good book impose their meaning upon us.
Thus they carry it within them in a certain way. As for the speaking
subject, he too must be enabled to outrun what he thought before,

388

THE COGTTO

and to find in his own words more than the thought he was putting
into them, otherwise we should not see thought, even solitary thought,
seeking expression with such perseverance. Speech is, therefore, that
paradoxical operation through which, by using words of a given
sense, and already available meanings, we try to follow up an inten¬
tion which necessarily outstrips, modifies, and itself, in the last
analysis, stabilizes the meanings of the words which translate it.
Constituted language plays the same limited role in the work of ex¬
pression as do colours in painting: had we not eyes, or more gener¬
ally senses, there would be no painting at all for us, yet the picture
‘tells’ us more than the mere use of our senses can ever do. The pic¬
ture over and above the sense-data, speech over and above linguistic
data must, therefore, in themselves possess a signifying virtue, inde¬
pendently of any meaning that exists for itself, in the mind of the
spectator or listener. ‘By using words as the painter uses colours and
the musician notes, we are trying to constitute, out of a spectacle or
an emotion, or even an abstract idea, a kind of equivalent or specie
soluble in the mind. Here the expression becomes the principal
thing. We mould and animate the reader, we cause him to participate
in our creative or poetic action, putting into the hidden mouth of his
mind the message of a certain object or of a certain feeling.’1 In the
painter or the speaking subject, picture and utterance respectively do
not illustrate a ready-made thought, but make that thought their
own. This is why we have been led to distinguish between a secon¬
dary speech which renders a thought already acquired, and an
originating speech which brings it into existence, in the first place
for ourselves, and then for others. Now all words which have become
mere signs for a linivocal thought have been able to do so only be¬
cause they have first of all functioned as originating words, and we
can still remember with what richness they appeared to be endowed,
and how they were like a landscape new to us, while we were engaged
in ‘acquiring’ them, and while they still fulfilled the primordial
function of expression. Thus self-possession and coincidence with
the self do not serve to define thought, which is, on the contrary, an
outcome of expression and always an illusion, in so far as the clarity
of what is acquired rests upon the fundamentally obscure operation
which has enabled us to immortalize within ourselves a moment of
fleeting life. We are invited to discern beneath thinking which basks
in its acquisitions, and offers merely a brief resting-place in the un¬
ending process of expression, another thought which is struggling to
establish itself, and succeeds only by bending the resources of con¬
stituted language to some fresh usage. This operation must be con¬
sidered as an ultimate fact, since any explanation of it — whether
1 Claudel, Reflexions sur le vers frangais, Positions et propositions , pp. 11-12.

389

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

empiricist, reducing new meanings to given ones; or idealist, positing
an absolute knowledge immanent in the most primitive forms of
knowledge — would amount to a denial of it. Language outruns us,
not merely because the use of speech always presupposes a great
number of thoughts which are not present in the mind and which are
covered by each word, but also for another reason, and a more pro¬
found one: namely, that these thoughts themselves, when present,
were not at any time ‘pure’ thoughts either, for already in them there
was a surplus of the signified over the signifying, the same effort of
thought already thought to equal thinking thought, the same pro¬
visional amalgam of both which gives rise to the whole mystery of
expression. That which is called an idea is necessarily linked to an act
of expression, and owes to it its appearance of autonomy. It is a
cultural object, like the church, the street, the pencil or the Ninth
Symphony. It may be said in reply that the church can be burnt down,
the street and pencil destroyed, and that, if all the scores of the Ninth
Symphony and all musical instruments were reduced to ashes, it
would survive only for a few brief years in the memory of those who
had heard it, whereas on the other hand the idea of the triangle and
its properties are imperishable. In fact, the idea of the triangle with
its properties, and of the quadratic equation, have their historical
and geographical area, and if the tradition in which they have been
handed down to us, and the cultural instruments which bear them
on, were to be destroyed, fresh acts of creative expression would be
needed to revive them in the world. What is true, however, is that,
once they have made their first appearance, subsequent ‘appearances’,
if successful, add nothing and if unsuccessful, subtract nothing, from
the quadratic equation, which remains an inexhaustible possession
among us. But the same may be said of the Ninth Symphony, which
lives on in its intelligible abode, as Proust has said, whether it is
played well or badly; or rather which continues its existence in a
more occult time than natural time. The time of ideas is not be
confused with that in which books appear and disappear, and musi¬
cal works are printed of lost: a book which has always been reprinted
one day ceases to be read, a musical work of which there were only
a few copies extant is suddenly much sought after. The existence of
the idea must not be confused with the empirical existence of the
means of expression, for ideas endure or fall into oblivion, and the
intelligible sky subtly changes colour. We have already drawn a dis¬
tinction between empirical speech — the word as a phenomenon of
sound, the fact that a certain word is uttered at a certain moment by
a certain person, which may happen independently of thought — and
transcendental or authentic speech, that by which an idea begins to
exist. But if there had been no mankind with phonatory or articula-

390

THE COGITO

tory organs, and a respiratory apparatus — or at least with a body
and the ability to move himself, there would have been no speech and
no ideas. What remains true is that in speech, to a greater extent
than in music or painting, thought seems able to detach itself from
its material instruments and acquire an eternal value. There is a
sense in which all triangles which will ever exist through the workings
of physical causality wiii always have angles the sum of which equals
two right angles, even if a time comes when men have forgotten their
geometry, and there is not a single person left who knows any. But
in this case it is because speech is applied to nature, whereas music,
and painting, like poetry, create their own object, and as soon as they
become sufficiently aware of themselves, deliberately confine them¬
selves within the cultural world. Prosaic, and particularly scientific,
utterance is a cultural entity which at the same time lays claim to
translate a truth relating to nature in itself. Now we know that this is
not the case, for modem criticism of the sciences has clearly shown
the constructive element in them. 'Real', i.e. perceived, triangles, do
not necessarily have, for all eternity, angles the sum of which equals
two right angles, if it is true that the space in which we live is no less
amenable to non-Euclidcan than to Euclidean geometry. Thus there
is no fundamental difference between the various modes of expres¬
sion, and no privileged position can be accorded to any of them on
the alleged ground that it expresses a truth in itself. Speech is as
dumb as music, music as eloquent as speech. Expression is every¬
where creative, and what is expressed is always inseparable from it.
There is no analysis capable of making language crystal clear and
arraying it before us as if it were an object. The act of speech is clear
only for the person who is actually speaking or listening; it becomes
obscure as soon as we try to bring explicitly to light those reasons
which have led us to understand thus and not otherwise. We can say
of it what we have said of perception, and what Pascal says about
opinions: in all three cases we have the same miracle of an im¬
mediately apprehended clarity, which vanishes as soon as we try
to break it down to what we believe to be its component elements. I
speak, and 1 understand myself and am understood quite unam¬
biguously; I take a new grip on my life, and others take a new grip
on it too. I may say that ‘I have been waiting for a long time’, or
that someone ‘is dead’, and I think I know what I am saying. Yet if
I question myself on time or the experience of death, which were
implied in my words, there is nothing clear in my mind. This is
because I have tried to speak about speech, to re-enact the act of
expression which gave significance to the words ‘dead’ and ‘time’,
to extend the brief hold on my experience which they ensure for me.
These second or thjrd order acts of expression, like the rest, have

391

BE1NG-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

indeed in each case their convincing clarity, without, however, ever
enabling me to dispel the fundamental obscurity of what is expressed,
or to eliminate the distance separating my thought from itself. Must
we conclude from this1 that, born and developed in obscurity, yet
capable of clarity, language is nothing but the obverse of an infinite
Thought, and the message of that Thought as communicated to us?
This would mean losing contact with the analysis which we have just
carried out, and reaching a conclusion in conflict with what has been
established as we have gone along. Language transcends us and yet
we speak. If we are led to conclude from this that there exists a trans¬
cendent thought spelt out by our words, we are supposing that an
attempt at expression is brought to completion, after saying that it
can never be so, and invoking an absolute thought, when we have just
shown that any such thought is beyond our conception. It is the
principle of Pascal’s apologetics, but the more it is shown that man
is without absolute power, the more any assertion of an absolute is
made, not probable, but on the contrary suspect. In fact analysis de¬
monstrates, not that there is behind language a transcendent thought,
but that language transcends itself in speech, that speech itself brings
about that concordance between me and myself, and between myself
and others, on which an attempt is being made to base that thought.
The phenomenon of language, in the double sense of primary fact
and remarkable occurrence, is not explained, but eliminated, if we
duplicate it with some transcendent thought, since it consists in this:
that an act of thought, once expressed, has the power to outlive it¬
self. It is not, as is often held, that the verbal formula serves us as a
mnemonic means: merely committed to writing or to memory, it
would be useless had we not acquired once and for all the inner
power of interpreting it. To give expression is not to substitute, for
new thought, a system of stable signs to which unchangeable thoughts
are linked, it is to ensure, by the use of words already used, that the
new intention carries on the heritage of the past, it is at a stroke to
incorporate the past into the present, and weld that present to a
future, to open a whole temporal cycle in which the ‘acquired’
thought will remain present as a dimension, without our needing
henceforth to summon it up or reproduce it. What is known as the
non-temporal in thought is what, having thus carried forward the
past and committed the future, is presumptively of all time and is
therefore anything but transcendent in relation to time. The non¬
temporal is the acquired.

Time itself presents us with the prime model of this permanent
acquisition. If time is the dimension in accordance with which events

1 As does B. Para in, Recherches sur la nature et lesfonctions du langage, Chap.
XI.

392

THE COGITO

drive each other successively from the scene, it is also that in accord¬
ance with which each one of them wins its unchallengeable place. To
say that an event takes place is to say that it will always be true that
it has taken place. Bach moment of time, in virtue of its very essence,
posits an existence against which the other moments of time are
powerless. After the construction is drawn, the geometrical relation
is acquired; even if I then forget the details of the proof, the mathe¬
matical gesture establishes a tradition. Van Gogh’s paintings have
their place in me for all time, a step is taken from which I cannot
retreat, and, even though I retain no clear recollection of the pictures
which I have seen, my whole subsequent aesthetic experience will be
that of someone who has become acquainted with the painting of
Van Gogh, exactly as a middle class man turned workman always
remains, even in his manner of being a workman, a middle-class-
man-turned-workman, or as an act confers a certain quality upon
us for ever, even though we may afterwards repudiate it and change
our beliefs. Existence always carries forward its past, whether it be
by accepting or disclaiming it. We are, as Proust declared, perched
on a pyramid of past life, and if we do not see this, it is because we
are obsessed by objective thought. We believe that our past, for our¬
selves, is reducible to the express memories which we are able to con¬
template. We sever our existence from the past itself, and allow it to
pick up only those threads of the past which are present. But how
are these threads to be recognized as threads of the past unless we
enjoy in some other way a direct opening upon that past ? Acquisition
must be accepted as an irreducible phenomenon. What we have ex¬
perienced is, and remains, permanently ours; and in old age a man
is still in contact with his youth. Every present as it arises is driven
into time like a wedge and stakes its claim to eternity. Eternity is not
another order of time, but the atmosphere of time. It is true that a
false thought, no less than a true one, possesses this sort of eternity :
if I am mistaken at this moment, it is for ever true that I am mistaken.
It would seem necessary, therefore, that there should be, in true
thought, a different fertility, and that it should remain true not only
as a past actually lived through, but also as a perpetual present for
ever carried forward in time’s succession. This, however, does not
make any essential difference between factual and rational truths,
For there is not one of my actions, not one of even my fallacious
thoughts, once it is adhered to, which has not been directed towards
a value or a truth, and which, in consequence, does not retain its
permanent relevance in the subsequent course of my life, not only
as an indelible fact, but also as a necessary stage on the road to the
more complete truths or values which I have since recognized. My
truths have been built out of these errors, and carry them along in

393

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

their eternity. Conversely, there is not one rational truth which does
not retain its coefficient of facticity: the alleged transparency of
Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as operative for a certain
period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that,
for a time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional
space as the ‘ground’ of their thoughts, and to assume unquestion-
ingly what generalized science will come to consider as a contingent
account of space. Thus every factual truth is a rational truth, and
vice versa . The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that
of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought
to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has
called Fundierung : the founding term, or originator— time, the un¬
reflective, the fact, language, perception— is primary in the sense that
the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the
originator, which prevents the latter from reabsorbing the former,
and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the
originated is not simply derived, since it is through the originated
that the originator is made manifest. It is for this reason that it is a
matter of indifference whether we say that the present foreshadows
eternity or that the eternity of truth is merely a sublimation of the
present. This ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood
as ultimate, if we recapture the intuition of real time which preserves
everything, and which is at the core of both proof and expression.
‘Reflection on the creative power of the mind,’ says Brunschvicg,1
‘implies, in every certainty of experience, the feeling that, in any de¬
terminate truth that one may have managed to demonstrate, there
exists a soul of truth which outruns it and frees itself from it, a soul
which can detach itself from the particular expression of that truth
in order to adumbrate a deeper and more comprehensive expression,
although this drive forward in no way impairs the eternity of the
true.’ What is this eternally true that no one possesses? What is this
thing expressed which lies beyond all expression, and, if we have the
right to posit it, why is it our constant concern to arrive at a more
precise expression? What is this One round which minds and truths
are disposed, as if they tended towards it, while it is maintained at
the same time that they tend towards no pre-established term? The
idea of a transcendent Being had at least the advantage of not stulti¬
fying the actions through which, in an ever difficult process of carry¬
ing forward, each consciousness and intersubjectivity themselves
forge their own unity. It is true that, if these actions belong to that
most intimate part of ourselves accessible to us, the positing of God
contributes nothing to the elucidation of our life. We experience, not
a genuine eternity and a participation in the One, but concrete acts
1 Les Progres de la Conscience dans la Philosophic occidental p. 794.

394

THE COGITO

of taking up and carrying forward by which, through time’s acci¬
dents, we are linked in relationships with ourselves and others. In
short, we experience a participation in the world , and ‘being-in-
truth’ is indistinguishable from being in the world.

We are now in a position to make up our minds about the question
of self-evidence, and to describe the experience of truth. There are
truths just as there are perceptions: not that we can ever array before
ourselves in their entirety the reasons for any assertion — there are
merely motives, we have merely a hold on time and not full posses¬
sion of it — but because it is of the essence of time to take itself up as
it leaves itself behind, and to draw itself together into visible things,
into immediately self-evident experiences. All consciousness is, in
some measure, perceptual consciousness. If it were possible to lay
bare and unfold all the presuppositions in what I call my reason or
my ideas at each moment, we should always find experiences which
have not been made explicit, large-scale contributions from past and
present, a whole ‘sedimentary history’1 which is not only relevant to
the genesis of my thought, but which determines its significance . For
an absolute self-evidence, free from any presupposition, to be pos¬
sible, and for my thought to be able to pierce through to itself, catch
itself in action, and arrive at a pure ‘assent of the self to the self’, it
would, to speak the language of the Kantians, have to cease to be an
event and become an act through and through: in the language of
the Schoolmen, its formal reality would have to be included in its
objective reality; in the language of Malebranche, it would have to
cease to be ‘perception’, ‘sentiment’ or ‘contact’ with truth, to be¬
come pure ‘idea’ and ‘vision’ of the truth. It would be necessary, in
other words, that instead of being myself, I should become purely
and simply one who knows myself, and that the world should have
ceased to exist around me in order to become purely and simply an
object before me. In relation to what we are by reason of our acquisi¬
tions and this pre-existent world, we have a power of placing in
abeyance, and that suffices to ensure our freedom from determinism.
I may well close my eyes, and stop up my ears, I shall nevertheless,
not cease to see, if it is only the blackness before my eyes, or to hear,
if only silence, and in the same way I can ‘bracket’ my opinions or
the beliefs I have acquired, but, whatever I think or decide, it is
always against the background of what I have previously believed or
done. Habemus ideam veram, we hold a truth, but this experience of
truth would be absolute knowledge only if we could thematize every
motive, that is, if we ceased to be in a situation. The actual possession
of the true idea does not, therefore, entitle us to predicate an intel¬
ligible abode of adequate thought and absolute productivity, it
1 Husserl, Formate und Iranszendentale Logik , p. 221.

2D 395

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

establishes merely a ‘teleology’1 of consciousness which, from this
first instrument, will forge more perfect ones, and these in turn more
perfect ones still, and so on endlessly. ‘Only through an eidetic in¬
tuition can the essence of eidetic intuition be elucidated,’ says Hus¬
serl.2 The intuition of some particular essence necessarily precedes,
in our experience, the essence of intuition. The only way to think
of thought is in the first place to think of something, and it is there¬
fore essential to that thought not to take itself as an object. To think
of thought is to adopt in relation to it an attitude that we have initi¬
ally learned in relation to ‘things’ ; it is never to eliminate, but merely
to push further back the opacity that thought presents to itself.
Every halt in the forward movement of consciousness, every focus
on the object, every appearance of a ‘something’ or of an idea pre¬
supposes a subject who has suspended self-questioning at least in
that particular respect. Which is why, as Descartes maintained, it is
true both that certain ideas are presented to me as irresistibly self-
evident de facto , and that this fact is never valid d e jure, and that it
never does away with the possibility of doubt arising as soon as we
are no longer in the presence of the idea. It is no accident that self¬
evidence itself may be called into question, because certainty is
doubt, being the carrying forward of a tradition of thought which
cannot be condensed into an evident ‘truth’ without my giving up all
attempts to make it explicit. It is for the same reasons that a self-
evident truth is irresistible in fact, yet always questionable, which
amounts to two ways of saying the same thing: namely, that it is
irresistible because I take for granted a certain acquisition of experi¬
ence, a certain field of thought, and precisely for this reason it ap¬
pears to me as self-evident for a certain thinking nature, the one
which I enjoy and perpetuate, but which remains contingent and
given to itself. The consistency of a thing perceived, of a geometrical
relationship or of an idea, is arrived at only provided that I give up
trying by every means to make it more explicit, and instead allow
myself to come to rest in it. Once launched, and committed to a cer¬
tain set of thoughts, Euclidean space, for example, or the conditions
governing the existence of a certain society, I discover evident truths;
but these are not unchallengeable, since perhaps this space or this
society are not the only ones possible. It is therefore of the essence
of certainty to be established only with reservations; there is an
opinion which is not a provisional form of knowledge destined to give
way later to an absolute form, but on the contrary, both the oldest or
most rudimentary, and the most conscious or mature form of know¬
ledge — an opinion which is primary in the double sense of ‘original’

1 This notion recurs frequently iri the later writings of Husserl.

2 Formate und transzendentale Logik , p. 220.

396

THE COGITO

and ‘fundamental’. This is what calls up before us something in
general , to which positing* thought — doubt or demonstration — can
subsequently relate in affirmation or denial. There is significance,
something and not nothing, there is an indefinite train of concordant
experiences, to which this ash-tray in its permanence testifies, or the
truth which I hit upon yesterday and to which I think I can revert
today.

This self-evidence of the phenomenon, or again of the ‘world’, is
no less misunderstood when we try to reach being without contact
with the phenomenon, that is, when we make being necessary, as
when we cut the phenomenon off from being, when we degrade it to
the status of mere appearance or possibility. The first conception is
Spinoza’s. Primary opinion is here subordinated to absolute self¬
evidence, and the notion, ‘there is something’ which is an amalgam
of being and nothingness, to the notion ‘Being exists’. We reject as
meaningless any questioning of being: it is impossible to ask why
there is something rather than nothing, and why this world rather
than a different one, since the shape of this world and the very exis¬
tence of a world are merely consequences of necessary being. The
second conception reduces self-evidence to appearance: all my truths
are after all self-evident only for me, and for a thought fashioned
like mine; they are bound up with my psycho-physiological con¬
stitution and the existence of this world. Other forms of thought
functioning in accordance with other rules, and other possible worlds,
can be conceived as having the same claim to reality as this one.
And here the question why there is something rather than nothing
seems apposite, and why this particular world has come into being,
but the reply is necessarily out of our reach, since we are imprisoned
in our psycho-physiological make-up, which is a simple fact like the
shape of our face or the number of our teeth. This second conception
is not so different from the first as it might appear: it implies a tacit
reference to an absolute knowledge and an absolute being in relation
to which our factual self-evidences, or synthetic truths, are con¬
sidered inadequate. According to the phenomenological conception,
this dogmatism on the one hand and scepticism on the other are both
left behind. The laws of our thought and our self-evident truths are
certainly facts, but they are not detachable from us, they are implied
in any conception that we may form of being and the possible. It is
not a question of confining ourselves to phenomena, of imprisoning
consciousness in its own states, while retaining the possibility of
another being beyond apparent being, nor of treating our thought as
one fact among many, but of defining being as that which appears,
and consciousness as a universal fact. I think, and this or that thought
* I.e. ‘thetic’ (Translator’s note).

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BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

appears to me as true; I am well aware that it is not unconditionally
true, and that the process of making it totally explicit would be an
endless task; but the fact remains that at the moment I think, I think
something, and that any other truth, in the name of which I might
wish to discount this one, must, if it is to be called a truth for me,
square with the ‘true’ thought of which I have experience. If I try
to imagine Martians, or angels, or some divine thought outside the
realm of my logic, this Martian, angelic or divine thought must figure
in my universe without completely disrupting it.1 My thought, my
self-evident truth is not one fact among others, but a value-fact
which envelops and conditions every other possible one. There is no
other world possible in the sense in which mine is, not because mine
is necessary as Spinoza thought, but because any ‘other world’ that I
might try to conceive would set limits to this one, would be found on
its boundaries, and would consequently merely fuse with it. Con¬
sciousness, if it is not absolute truth or a-AeOeia, at least rules out all
absolute falsity. Our mistakes, illusions and questions are indeed
mistakes, illusions and questions. Error is not consciousness of
error; it even excludes such consciousness. Our questions do not
always admit of answers, and to say with Marx that man poses for
himself only problems that he can solve is to revive a theological
optimism and postulate the consummation of the world. Our errors
become truths only once they are recognized, and there remains a
difference between their revealed and their latent content of truth,
between their alleged and their actual significance. The truth is that
neither error nor doubt ever cut us off from the truth, because they
are surrounded by a world horizon in which the teleology of con¬
sciousness summons us to an effort at resolving it. Finally, the con¬
tingency of the world must not be understood as a deficiency in be¬
ing, a break in the stuff of necessary being, a threat to rationality, nor
as a problem to be solved as soon as possible by the discovery of
some deeper-laid necessity. That is ontic contingency, contingency
within the bounds of the world. Ontological contingency, the contin¬
gency of the world itself, being radical, is, on the other hand, what
forms the basis once and for all of our ideas of truth. The world is
that reality of which the necessary and the possible are merely pro¬
vinces.

To sum up, we are restoring to the cogito a temporal thickness. If
there is not endless doubt, and if ‘I think’, it is because I plunge on
into provisional thoughts and, by deeds, overcome time’s discon¬
tinuity. Thus vision is brought to rest in a thing seen which both

1 See Logische Untersuchungen , I, p. 117. What is sometimes termed Husserl’s
rationalism is in reality the recognition of subjectivity as an inalienable fact, and
of the world to which it is directed as omnitudo realitatis.

398

THE COGITO

precedes and outlasts it. Have we got out of our difficulty? We have
admitted that the certainty of vision and that of the thing seen are of
a piece. Must we conclude from this that, since the thing seen is
never absolutely certain, as illusions show, vision also is involved in
this uncertainty, or, on the contrary, that, since vision on its own is
absolutely certain, so is the thing seen, so that I am never really mis¬
taken? The second solution would amount to reinstating the im¬
manence which we have banished. But if we adopted the first,
thought would be cut off from itself, there would no longer be any¬
thing but Tacts of consciousness’ which might be called internal by
nominal definition, but which, for me, would be as opaque as things;
there would no longer be either inner experience or consciousness,
and the experience of the cogito would be once more forgotten.
When we describe consciousness as involved through its body in a
space, through its language in a history, through its prejudices in
a concrete form of thought, it is not a matter of setting it back in a
series of objective events, even though they be ‘psychic’ events, and
in the causal system of the world. He who doubts cannot, while
doubting, doubt that he doubts. Doubt, even when generalized, is
not the abolition of my thought, it is merely a pseudo-nothingness,
for I cannot extricate myself from being; my act of doubting itself
creates the possibility of certainty and is there for me, it occupies me,
I am committed to it, and I cannot pretend to be nothing at the time
I execute it. Reflection, which moves all things away to a distance,
discovers itself as at least given to itself in the sense that it cannot
think of itself as eliminated, or stand apart from itself. But this does
not mean that reflection and thought are elementary facts there to
be observed as such. As Montaigne clearly saw, one can call into
question thought which is loaded with a sediment of history and
weighed down with its own being, one can entertain doubts about
doubt itself, considered as a definite modality of thought and as
consciousness of a doubtful object, but the formula of radical re¬
flection is not: T know nothing’ — a formula which it is all too easy to
catch in flat contradiction with itself — but: ‘What do I know?’
Descartes was not unmindful of this. He has frequently been credited
with having gone beyond sceptical doubt, which is a mere state, and
with making doubt into a method, an act, and with having thus pro¬
vided consciousness with a fixed point and reinstated certainty. But,
in fact, Descartes did not suspend doubt in the face of the certainty
of doubt itself, as if the act of doubting were sufficient to sweep
doubt away by entailing a certainty. He took it further. He does not
say: ‘I doubt, therefore I am’, but ‘I think, therefore I am’, which
means that doubt itself is certain, not as actual doubt, but as pure
thought about doubting and, since the same might be said in turn

399

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

about this thought, the only proposition which is absolutely certain
and which halts doubt in its tracks because it is implied by that
doubt, is: ‘I think/ or again, ‘something appears to me’. There is no
act, no particular experience which exactly fills my consciousness and
imprisons my freedom, ‘there is no thought which abolishes the
power to think and brings it to a conclusion — no definite position of
the bolt that finally closes the lock. No, there is no thought which is a
resolution born of its own very development and, as it were, the final
chord of this permanent dissonance/1 No particular thought reaches
through to the core of our thought in general, nor is any thought
conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it. And
this is no imperfection from which we may imagine consciousness
freed. If there must be consciousness, if something must appear to
someone, it is necessary that behind all our particular thoughts there
should lie a retreat of not-being, a Self. I must avoid equating myself
with a series of ‘consciousnesses’, for each of these, with its load of
sedimentary history and sensible implications, must present itself to
a perpetual absentee. Our situation, then, is as follows: in order to
know that we think, it is necessary in the first place that we actually
should think. Yet this commitment does not dispel all doubts, for
my thoughts do not deprive me of my power to question; a word or
an idea, considered as events in my history, have meaning forme only
ifT take up this meaning from within. I know that I think through
such and such particular thoughts that I have, and I know that I have
these thoughts because I carry them forward, that is, because I know
that I think in general. The aim at a transcendent objective and the
view of myself aiming at it, the awareness of the connected and of
connecting are in a circular relationship. The problem is how I can be
the constituting agent of my thought in general, failing which it
would not be thought by anybody, would pass unnoticed and would
therefore not be thought at all — without ever being that agent of my
particular thoughts, since 1 never see them come into being in the
full light of day, but merely know myself through them. The question
is how subjectivity can be both dependent yet irremovable.

Let us tackle this by taking language as our example. There is a
consciousness of myself which makes use of language and is hum¬
ming with words. I read, let us say, the Second Meditation . It con¬
cerns the self, but rather the idea of the self which is, strictly speaking,
neither mine nor, for that matter, Descartes’, but that of any reflect¬
ing man. By following the meaning of the words and the argument,
I reach the conclusion that indeed because I think, I am; but this is
merely a verbal cogito , for I have grasped my thought and my exis¬
tence only through the medium of language, and the true formula of

1 Valery, Introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vinci, Variete, p. 194.

400

THE COG1TO

this cogito should be: ‘One thinks, therefore one is.’ The wonderful
thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion: my eyes
follow the lines on the paper, and from the moment I am caught up
in their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the letters on it, my
eyes and body are there only as the minimum setting of some invis¬
ible operation. Expression fades out before what is expressed, and
this is why its mediating role may pass unnoticed, and why Descartes
nowhere mentions it. Descartes, and a fortiori his reader, begin their
meditation in what is already a universe of discourse. This certainty
which we enjoy of reaching, beyond expression, a truth separable
from it and of which expression is merely the garment and contin¬
gent manifestation, has been implanted in us precisely by language.
It appears as a mere sign only once it has provided itself with a
meaning, and the coming to awareness, if it is to be complete, must
rediscover the expressive unity in which both signs and meaning ap¬
pear in the first place. When a child cannot speak, or cannot yet
speak the adult’s language, the linguistic ritual which unfolds around
him has no hold on him, he is near us in the same way as is a specta¬
tor with a poor seat at the theatre; he sees clearly enough that we are
laughing and gesticulating, he hears the nasal tune being played, but
there is nothing at the end of those gestures or behind those words,
nothing happens for him. Language takes on a meaning for the child
when it establishes a situation for him. A story is told in a children’s
book of the disappointment of a small boy who put on his grand¬
mother’s spectacles and took up her book in the expectation of being
able himself to find in it the stories which she used to tell him. The
tale ends with these words: ‘Well, what a fraud! Where’s the story?
1 can see nothing but black and white.’ For the child the ‘story’ and
the thing expressed are not ‘ideas’ or ‘meanings’, nor are speaking or
reading ‘intellectual operations’. The story is a world which there
must be some way of magically calling up by putting on spectacles
and leaning over a book. The power possessed by language
of bringing the thing expressed into existence, of opening up to
thought new ways, new dimensions and new landscapes, is, in the
last analysis, as obscure for the adult as for the child. In every suc¬
cessful work, the significance carried into the reader’s mind exceeds
language and thought as already constituted and is magically thrown
into relief during the linguistic incantation, just as the story used to
emerge from grandmother’s book. In so far as we believe that,
through thought, we are in direct communication with a universe of
truth in which we are at one with others, in so far as Descartes’ text
seems merely to arouse in us thoughts already formed, and that we
never learn anything from outside, and finally in so far as a philoso¬
pher, in a meditation purporting to be thoroughgoing, never even

401

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

mentions language as the condition of the reading of the cogito, and
does not invite us more unmistakably to pass from the idea to the
practice of the cogito , it is because we take the process of expression
for granted, and count it among our acquisitions. The cogito at which
we arrive by reading Descartes (and even the one which Descartes
effects in relation to expression and when, looking back on his past
life, he fastens it down, objectifies it and ‘characterizes’ it as indubit¬
able) is, then, a spoken cogito , put into words and understood in
words, and for this very reason not attaining its objective, since that
part of our existence which is engaged in fixing our life in conceptual
forms, and thinking of it as indubitable, is escaping focus and
thought. Shall we therefore conclude that language envelops us, and
that we are led by it, much as the realist believes he is subject to the
determinism of the external world, or as the theologian believes he is
led on by Providence? This would be to forget half the truth. For
after all, words, ‘cogito’ and ‘sum’ for example, may well have an
empirical and statistical meaning, for it is the case that they are not
directed specifically to my own experience, but form the basis of a
general and anonymous thought. Nevertheless, I should find them
not so much derivative and inauthentic as meaningless, and I should
be unable even to read Descartes’ book, were I not, before any
speech can begin, in contact with my own life and thought, and if the
spoken cogito did not encounter within me a tacit cogito . This silent
cogito was the one Descartes sought when writing his Meditations .
He gave life and direction to all those expressive operations which,
by definition, always miss their target since, between Descartes’ exis¬
tence and the knowledge of it which he acquires, they interpose the
full thickness of cultural acquisitions. And yet Descartes would not
even have tried to put these expressive operations into operation had
he not in the first place caught a glimpse of his existence. The whole
question amounts to gaining a clear understanding of the unspoken
cogito , to putting into it only what is really there, and not making
language into a product of consciousness on the excuse that con¬
sciousness is not a product of language.

Neither the word nor the meaning of the word is, in fact constituted
by consciousness. Let us make this clear. The word is certainly never
reducible to one of its embodiments. The word ‘sleet’, for example,
is not the set of characters which I have just written on the paper,
nor that other set of signs that I once read in a book for the first
time, nor again the sound that runs through the air when I pronounce
it. Those are merely reproductions of the word, in which I recognize
it but which do not exhaust it. Am I then to say that the word ‘sleet’
is the unified idea of these manifestations, and that it exists only for
my consciousness and through a synthesis of identification? To do so

402

THE COGITO

would be to forget what psychology has taught us about language.
To speak, as we have seen, is not to call up verbal images and arti¬
culate words in accordance with the imagined model. By undertaking
a critical examination of the verbal image, and showing that the
speaking subject plunges into speech without imagining the words he
is about to utter, modern psychology eliminates the word as a repre¬
sentation, or as an object for consciousness, and reveals a motor
presence of the word which is not the knowledge of the word. The
word ‘sleet’, when it is known to me, is not an object which I recog¬
nize through any identificatory synthesis, but a certain use made of
my phonatory equipment, a certain modulation of my body as a
being in the world. Its generality is not that of the idea, but that of a
behavioural style ‘understood’ by my body in so far as the latter is
a behaviour-producing power, in this case a phoneme-producing one.
One day I ‘caught on’ to the word ‘sleet*, much as one imitates a
gesture, not, that is, by analysing it and performing an articulatory
or phonetic action corresponding to each part of the word as heard,
but by hearing it as a single modulation of the world of sound, and
because this acoustic entity presents itself as ‘something to pro¬
nounce’ in virtue of the all-embracing correspondence existing be¬
tween my perceptual potentialities and my motor ones, which are
elements of my indivisible and open existence. The word has never
been inspected, analysed, known and constituted, but caught and
taken up by a power of speech and, in the last analysis, by a motor
power given to me along with the first experience I have of my body
and its perceptual and practical fields. As for the meaning of the word,
I learn it as I learn to use a tool, by seeing it used in the context of a
certain situation. The word’s meaning is not compounded of a cer¬
tain number of physical characteristics belonging to the object; it is
first and foremost the aspect taken on by the object in human ex¬
perience, for example my wonder in the face of .these hard, then
friable, then melting pellets falling ready-made from the sky. Here
we have a meeting of the human and the non-human and, as it were,
a piece of the world’s behaviour, a certain version of its style, and
the generality of its meaning as well as that of the vocable is not the
generality of the concept, but of the world as typical. Thus language
presupposes nothing less than a consciousness of language, a silence
of consciousness embracing the world of speech in which words first
receive a form and meaning. This is why consciousness is never sub¬
ordinated to any empirical language, why languages can be trans¬
lated and learned, and finally, why language is not an attribute of
external origin, in the sociologist’s sense. Behind the spoken cogito ,
the one which is converted into discourse and into essential truth,
there lies a tacit cogito , myself experienced by myself. But this

403

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN -THE- WORLD

subjectivity, albeit imperious, has upon itself and upon the world only
a precarious hold. It does not constitute the world, it divines the
world’s presence round about it as a field not provided by itself; nor
does it constitute the word, but speaks as we sing when wc are happy ;
nor again the meaning of the word, which instantaneously emerges
for it in its dealing with the world and other men living in it, being
at the intersection of many lines of behaviour, and being, even once
‘acquired’, as precise and yet as indefinable as the significance of a
gesture. The tacit cogito, the presence of oneself to oneself, being no
less than existence, is anterior to any philosophy, and knows itself
only in those extreme situations in which it is under threat: for ex¬
ample, in the dread of death or of another’s gaze upon me. What is
believed to be thought about thought, as pure feeling of the self, can¬
not yet be thought and needs to be revealed. The consciousness
which conditions language is merely a comprehensive and inarticul¬
ate grasp upon the world, like that of the infant at its first breath, or
of the man about to drown and who is impelled towards life, and
though it is true that all particular knowledge is founded on this
primary view, it is true also that the latter waits to be won back, fixed
and made explicit by perceptual exploration and by speech. Silent
consciousness grasps itself only as a generalized ‘1 think’ in face of a
confused world ‘to be thought about’. Any particular seizure, even
the recovery of this generalized project by philosophy, demands that
the subject bring into action powers which are a closed book to him
and, in particular, that he should become a speaking subject. The
tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself.

Such formulations may appear puzzling: if ultimate subjectivity
cannot think of itself the moment it exists, how can it ever do so ?
How can that which docs not think take to doing so ? And is not sub¬
jectivity made to amount to a thing or a force which produces its
effects without being capable of knowing it? We do not mean that
the primordial / completely overlooks itself. If it did, it would indeed
be a thing, and nothing could cause it subsequently to become con¬
sciousness. Wc have merely withheld from it objective thought, posit¬
ing consciousness of the world and of itself. What do we mean by
this? Either these words mean nothing at all, or else they mean that
we refrain from assuming an explicit consciousness which duplicates
and sustains the confused grasp of primary subjectivity upon itself
and upon its world. My vision, for example, is certainly ‘thinking
that I see’, if we mean thereby that it is not simply a bodily function
like digestion or respiration, a collection of processes so grouped as
to have a significance in a larger system, but that it is itself that
system and that significance, that anteriority of the future to the
present, of the whole to its parts. There is vision only through antici-

404

THE COGITO

pation and intention, and since no intention could be a true inten¬
tion if the object towards which it tends were given to it ready made
and with no motivation, it is true that all vision assumes in the last
resort, at the core of subjectivity, a total project or a logic of the
world which empirical perceptions endow with specific form, but to
which they cannot give rise. But vision is not thinking that one sees,
if we understand thereby that it itself links up with its object, and
that it becomes aware of itself as absolutely transparent, and as the
originator of its own presence in the visible world. The essential
point is clearly to grasp the project towards the world that we are.
What we have said above about the world’s being inseparable from
our views of the world should here help us to understand subjectivity
conceived as inherence in the world. There is no hyli , no sensation
which is not in communication with other sensations or the sensa¬
tions of other people, and for this very reason there is no morphe , no
apprehension or apperception, the office of which is to give signi¬
ficance to a matter that has none, and to ensure the a priori unity of
my experience, and experience shared with others. Suppose that my
friend Paul and I are looking at a landscape. What precisely hap¬
pens? Must it be said that we have both private sensations, that we
know things but cannot communicate them to each other — that,
as far as pure, lived-through experience goes, we are each incarcer¬
ated in our separate perspectives — that the landscape is not numeri¬
cally the same for both of us and that it is a question only of a
specific identity? When I consider my perception itself, before any
objectifying reflection, at no moment am I aware of being shut up
within my own sensations. My friend Paul and I point out to each
other certain details of the landscape; and Paul’s finger, which is
pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of
as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul’s finger which
itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I
make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can
see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some
pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine:
I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul’s world and
guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of
private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of
interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of
the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with
whom I am in communication through that world and that history.
Are we to say, then, that what we are concerned with is an ideal
unity, that my world is the same as Paul’s, just as the quadratic
equation spoken of in Tokyo is the same as the one spoken of in
Paris, and that in short the ideal nature of the world guarantees its

405

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- W ORLD

intersubjective value? But ideal unity is not satisfactory either, for it
exists no less between Mount Hymettus seen by the ancient Greeks
and the same mountain seen by me. Now it is no use my telling my¬
self, as I contemplate those russet mountain sides, that the Greeks
saw them too, for I cannot convince myself that they are the same
ones. On the other hand, Paul and I ‘together’ see this landscape,
we are jointly present in it, it is the same for both of us, not only as an
intelligible significance, but as a certain accent of the world’s style,
down to its very thisness. The unity of the world crumbles and falls
asunder under the influence of that temporal and spatial distance
which the ideal unity can cover while remaining (in theory) unim¬
paired. It is precisely because the landscape makes its impact upon
me and produces feelings in me, because it reaches me in my uni¬
quely individual being, because it is my own view of the landscape,
that I enjoy possession of the landscape itself, and the landscape for
Paul as well as for me. Both universality and the world lie at the
core of individuality and the subject, and this will never be under¬
stood as long as the world is made into an ob-ject. It is understood
immediately if the world is the field of our experience, and if we are
nothing but a view of the world, for in that case it is seen that the
most intimate vibration of our psycho-physical being already an¬
nounces the world, the quality being the outline of a thing, and the
thing the outline of the world. A world which, as Malebranche puts
it, never gets beyond being an ‘unfinished work’, or which, as Hus¬
serl says of the body, is ‘never completely constituted’, does not
require, and even rules out, a constituting subject. There must be,
corresponding to this adumbration of being which appears through
the concordant aspects of my own experience, or of the experience I
share with others — experience which I presume capable of being
consummated through indefinite horizons, from the sole fact that
my phenomena congeal into a thing, and display, as they occur, a
certain consistency of style — there must be, then, corresponding to
this open unity of the world, an open and indefinite unity of sub¬
jectivity. Like the world’s unity, that of the / is invoked rather than
experienced each time I perform an act of perception, each time I
reach a self-evident truth, and the universal I is the background
against which these effulgent forms stand out: it is through one
present thought that I achieve the unity of all my thoughts. What
remains, on the hither side of my particular thoughts, to constitute
the tacit cogito and the original project towards the world, and what,
ultimately, am I in so far as I can catch a glimpse of myself indepen¬
dently of any particular act? I am a field, an experience. One day,
once and for all, something was set in motion which, even during
sleep, can no longer cease to see or not to see, to feel or not to feel,

406

THE COGITO

to suffer or be happy, to think or rest from thinking, in a word to
‘have it out’ with the world. There then arose, not a new set of sensa¬
tions or states of consciousness, not even a new monad or a new
perspective, since I am not tied to any one perspective but can change
my point of view, being under compulsion only in that I must always
have one, and can have only one at once — let us say, therefore, that
there arose a fresh possibility of situations . The event of my birth has
not passed completely away, it has not fallen into nothingness in the
way that an event of the objective world does, for it committed a
whole future, not as a cause determines its effect, but as a situation,
once created, inevitably leads on to some outcome. There was hence¬
forth a new ‘setting’, the world received a fresh layer of meaning. In
the home into which a child is born, all objects change their signi¬
ficance; they begin to await some as yet indeterminate treatment at
his hands; another and different person is there, a new personal his¬
tory, short or long, has just been initiated, another account has been
opened. My first perception, along with the horizons which sur¬
rounded it, is an ever-present event, an unforgettable tradition; even
as a thinking subject, I still am that first perception, the continuation
of that same life inaugurated by it. In one sense, there are no more
acts of consciousness or distinct Erlebnisse in a life than there are
separate things in the world. Just as, as we have seen, when I walk
round an object, I am not presented with a succession of perspective
views which I subsequently co-ordinate thanks to the idea of one
single flat projection, there being merely a certain amount of ‘shift’
in the thing which, in itself, is journeying through time, so I am not
myself a succession of ‘psychic’ acts, nor for that matter a nuclear I
who bring them together into a synthetic unity, but one single ex¬
perience inseparable from itself, one single ‘living cohesion’,1 one
single temporality which is engaged, from birth, in making itself
progressively explicit, and in confirming that cohesion in each suc¬
cessive present. It is this advent or again this event of transcendental
kind that the cogito reveals. The primary truth is indeed ‘I think’, but
only provided that we understand thereby ‘I belong to myself’2
while belonging to the world. When we try to go deeper into subjec¬
tivity, calling all things into question and suspending all our beliefs,
the only form in which a glimpse is vouchsafed to us of that non¬
human ground through which, in the words of Rimbaud, ‘we are not
of the world’, is as the horizon of our particular commitments, and
as the potentiality of something in the most general sense, which is
the world’s phantom. Inside and outside are inseparable. The world
is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself. When I perceive

1 ‘Zusammenhang des Lebens/ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 388.

2 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit , pp. 124-5.

407

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING -IN-THE- WORLD

this table, the perception of the top must not overlook that of the
legs, otherwise the object would be thrown out of joint. When I hear
a melody, each of its moments must be related to its successor, other¬
wise there would be no melody. Yet the table is there with its external
parts, and succession is of the essence of melody. The act which
draws together at the same time takes away and holds at a distance,
so that I touch myself only by escaping from myself. In a thought of
his which is famous, Pascal shows that in one way I understand the
world, and in another it understands me. We must add that it is in
the same way: I understand the world because there are for me things
near and far, foregrounds and horizons, and because in this way it
forms a picture and acquires significance before me, and this finally
is because I am situated in it and it understands me. We do not say
that the notion of the world is inseparable from that of the subject, or
that the subject thinks himself inseparable from the idea of his body
and the idea of the world; for, if it were a matter of no more than a
conceived relationship, it would ipso facto leave the absolute inde¬
pendence of the subject as thinker intact, and the subject would not be
in a situation. If the subject is in a situation, even if he is no more
than a possibility of situations, this is because he forces his ipseity
into reality only by actually being a body, and entering the world
through that body. In so far as, when I reflect on the essence of sub¬
jectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the
world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with
my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and be¬
cause the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable
from this body and this world. The ontological world and body
which we find at the core of the subject are not the world or body as
idea, but on the one hand the world itself contracted into a compre¬
hensive grasp, and on the other the body itself as a knowing-body.

But, it will be asked, if the unity of the world is not based on that
of consciousness, and if the world is not the outcome of a constitut¬
ing effort, how does it come about that appearances accord with
each other and group themselves together into things, ideas and
truths ? And why do our random thoughts, the events of our life and
those of collective history, at least at certain times assume common
significance and direction, and allow themselves to be subsumed
under one idea ? Why does my life succeed in drawing itself together
in order to project itself in words, intentions and acts? This is the
problem of rationality. The reader is aware that, on the whole,
classical thought tries to explain the concordances in question in
terms of a world in itself, or in terms of an absolute mind. Such
explanations borrow all the forces of conviction which they can
carry from the phenomenon of rationality, and therefore fail to

408

THE COOITO

explain that phenomenon, or ever to achieve greater clarity than it
possesses. Absolute Thought is no clearer to me than my own finite
mind, since it is through the latter that I conceive the former. We are
in the world, which means that things take shape, an immense
individual asserts itself, each existence is self-comprehensive and
comprehensive of the rest. All that has to be done is to recognize these
phenomena which are the ground of all our certainties. The belief in
an absolute mind, or in a world in itself detached from us is no more
than a rationalization of this primordial faith.

409

TEMPORALITY

Le temps est le sens de la vie {sens: comme on dit le
sens d’un cours d’eau, le sens d’une phrase, le sens d’une
etoffe, le sens de Todorat).

Claudel, Art Poetique.

Der Sinn des Daseins ist die Zeitlichkeit.

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit , p. 331.

IN so far as, in the preceding pages, we have already met time on our
way to subjectivity, this is primarily because all our experiences,
inasmuch as they are ours, arrange themselves in terms of before and
after, because temporality, in Kantian language, is the form taken by
our inner sense, and because it is the most general characteristic of
‘psychic facts’. But in reality, and without prejudging what the analy¬
sis of time will disclose, we have already discovered, between time
and subjectivity, a much more intimate relationship. We have just
seen that the subject, who cannot be a series of psychic events, never¬
theless cannot be eternal either. It remains for him to be temporal not
by reason of some vagary of the human make-up, but by virtue of an
inner necessity. We are called upon to conceive the subject and time
as communicating from within. We can now say of temporality what
we said earlier about sexuality and spatiality, for example: existence
can have no external or contingent attribute. It cannot be anything —
spatial, sexual, temporal — without being so in its entirety, without
taking up and carrying forward its ‘attributes’ and making them into
so many dimensions of its being, with the result that an analysis of
any one of them that is at all searching really touches upon subjec¬
tivity itself. There are no principal and subordinate problems: all
problems are concentric. To analyse time is not to follow out the
consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it is to
gain access, through time, to its concrete structure. If we succeed in
understanding the subject, it will not be in its pure form, but by

410

TEMPORALITY

seeking it at the intersection of its dimensions. We need, therefore, to
consider time in itself, and it is by following through its internal
dialectic that we shall be led to revise our idea of the subject.

We say that time passes or flows by. We speak of the course of time.
The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the
mountains, with the melting of the glacier; it is now in front of me
and makes its way towards the sea into which it will finally discharge
itself. If time is similar to a river, it flow fi from the past towards the
present and the future. The present is t/he consequence of the past,
and the future of the present. But this often repeated metaphor is in
reality extremely confused. For, looking at the things themselves , the
melting of the snows and what results fkom this are not successive
events, or rather the very notion of event has no place in the objective
world. When I say that the day before yesterday the glacier produced
the water which is passing at this moment, I aitL tacitly assuming the
existence of a witness tied to a certain spot in the world, and I am
comparing his successive views: he was there when the snows melted
and followed the water down, or else, from the edge of the river and
having waited two days, he sees the pieces of wood that he threw into
the water at its source. The ‘events’ are shapes cut out by a finite
observer from the spatio-temporal totality of the objective world.
But on the other hand, if I consider the world itself, there is simply
one indivisible and changeless being in it. Change presupposes a
certain position which I take up and from which I see things in pro¬
cession before me : there are no events without someone to whom they
happen and whose finite perspective is the basis of their individuality.
Time presupposes a view of time. It is, therefore, not like a river, not
a flowing substance. The fact that the metaphor based on this com¬
parison has persisted from the time of Heraclitus to our own day is
explained by our surreptitiously putting into the river a witness of its
course. We do this already when we say that the stream discharges
itself, for this amounts to conceiving, where there is merely a thing
entirely external to itself, an individuality or interior of the stream
which manifests itself outside. Now, no sooner have I introduced an
observer, whether he follows the river or whether he stands on the
bank and observes its flow, than temporal relationships are reversed.
In the latter case, the volume of water already carried by is not mov¬
ing towards the future, but sinking into the past; what is to come is
on the side of the source, for time does not come from the past. It
is not the past that pushes the present, nor the present that pushes
the future, into being; the future is not prepared behind the observer,
it is a brooding presence moving to meet him, like a storm on the
horizon. If the observer sits in a boat and is carried by the current, we
may say that he is moving downstream towards his future, but the
2E 41 1

BEING -FOR-ITSELF AND BEING -IN-THE- WORLD

future lies in the new landscapes which await him at the estuary, and
the course of time is no longer the stream itself: it is the landscape as
it rolls by for the moving observer. Time is, therefore, not a real pro¬
cess, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises
from my relation to things. Within things themselves, the future and
the past are in a kind of eternal state of pre-existence and survival;
the water which will flow by tomorrow is at this moment at its source,
the water which has just passed is now a little further downstream in
the valley. What is past or future for me is present in the world. It is
often said that, within things themselves, the future is not yet, the
past is no longer, while the present, strictly speaking, is infinitesimal,
so that time collapses. That is why Leibnitz was able to define the
objective world as mens momentanea , and why Saint Augustine, in
order to constitute time, required, besides the presence of the pre¬
sent, a presence of the past and of the future. But let us be clear about
what they mean. If the objective world is incapable of sustaining
time, it is not because it is in some way too narrow, and that we need
to add to it a bit of past and a bit of future. Past and future exist only
too unmistakably in the world, they exist in the present, and what
being itself lacks in order to be of the temporal order, is the not-
being of elsewhere, formerly and tomorrow. The objective world is
too much of a plenum for there to be time. Past and future withdraw
of their own accord from being and move over into subjectivity in
search, not of some real support, but, on the contrary, of a possi¬
bility of not-being which accords with their nature. If we separate the
objective world from the finite perspectives which open upon it, and
posit it in itself, we find everywhere in it only so many instances of
‘now’. These instances of ‘now’, moreover, not being present to any¬
body, have no temporal character and could not occur in sequence.
The definition of time which is implicit in the comparisons under¬
taken by common sense, and which might be formulated as ‘a suc¬
cession of instances of now ’ 1 has not even the disadvantage of treating
past and future as presents: it is inconsistent, since it destroys the
very notion of ‘now’, and that of succession.

We should, then, gain nothing by transferring into ourselves the
time that belongs to things, if we repeated ‘in consciousness’ the
mistake of defining it as a succession of instances of now. Yet this is
what psychologists do when they try to ‘explain’ consciousness of the
past in terms of memories, and consciousness of the future in terms
of the projection of these memories ahead of us. The refutation of
‘physiological theories’ of memory, in Bergson for example, is under¬
taken in the domain of causal explanation; it consists in showing
that paths in the brain and other bodily expedients are not adequate

1 ‘Nacheinander der Jetztpunkte,’ Heidegger, Sein undZeit , for example p. 422.

412

TEMPORALITY

causes of the phenomena of memory; that, for example, nothing can
be found in the body to account for the order of disappearance of
memories in cases of progressive aphasia. The discussion conducted
on these lines certainly discredits the idea of a bodily storage of the
past: the body is no longer a receptacle of engrams, but an organ of
mimicry with the function of ensuring the intuitive realization of the
‘intentions’1 of consciousness. But these intentions cling on to
memories preserved ‘in the unconscious’, and the presence of the
past in consciousness remains a simple factual presence; it has passed
unnoticed that our best reason for rejecting the physiological pre¬
servation of the past is equally a reason for rejecting its ‘psychological
preservation’, and that reason is that no preservation, no physio¬
logical or psychic ‘trace’ of the past can make consciousness of the
past understandable. This table bears traces of my past life, for I
have carved my initials on it and spilt ink on it. But these traces in
themselves do not refer to the past: they are present; and, in so far as
I find in them signs of some ‘previous’ event, it is because I derive
my sense of the past from elsewhere, because I carry this particular
significance within myself. If my brain stores up traces of the bodily
process which accompanied one of my perceptions, and if the appro¬
priate nervous influx passes once more through these already fretted
channels, my perception will reappear, but it will be a fresh per¬
ception, weakened and unreal perhaps, but in no case will this per¬
ception, which is present, be capable of pointing to a past event, un¬
less I have some other view of my past which enables me to recognize
it as memory, which runs counter to the hypothesis. If we now go on
to substitute ‘psychic traces’ for physiological ones, and if our per¬
ceptions are preserved in an unconscious, the difficulty will be the
same as before: a preserved perception is a perception, it continues to
exist, it persists in the present, and it does not open behind us that
dimension of escape and absence that we call the past. A preserved
fragment of the lived-through past can be at the most no more than
an occasion for thinking of the past, but it is not the past which is
compelling recognition; recognition, when we try to derive it from
any content whatever, always precedes itself. Reproduction pre¬
supposes re-cognition, and cannot be understood as such unless I
have in the first place a sort of direct contact with the past in its own
domain. Nor can one, a fortiori , construct the future out of contents
of consciousness: no actual content can be taken, even equivocally,
as evidence concerning the future, since the future has not even been
in existence and cannot, like the past, set its mark upon us. The only
conceivable way, therefore, of explaining the relation of future to
present is by putting it on the same footing as that between present
1 Bergson, Mature et Me moire, p. 137, note 1, p. 139.

413

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

and past. When I consider the long procession of my past states, I
see that my present is always passing, and I can anticipate this pas¬
sage, treat my immediate past as a remote one, and my actual present
as past: ahead of it is then a vacuum, and this is the future. Looking
ahead would seem in reality to be retrospection, and the future a
projection of the past. But even if, per impossibile , I could construct
consciousness of the past with transferred presents, they certainly
could not open a future for me. Even if, in fact, we form an idea of the
future with the help of what we have seen, the fact remains that, in
order to pro-ject it ahead of us, we need in the first place a sense of
the future. If prospection is retrospection, it is in any case an antici¬
patory retrospection, and how could one anticipate if one had no
sense of the future? It is said that we guess ‘by analogy’ that this
inimitable present will, like all the others, pass away. But for there
to be an analogy between presents that have elapsed and the actual
present, the latter must be given not only as present, it must already
announce itself as what will soon be past, we must feel the pressure
upon it of a future intent on dispossessing it; in short the course of
time must be primarily not only the passing of present to past, but
also that of the future to the present. If it can be said that all pro¬
spection is anticipatory retrospection, it can equally well be said that
all retrospection is prospection in reverse: I know that I was in
Corsica before the war, because I know that the war was on the
horizon of my trip there. The past and the future cannot be mere con¬
cepts abstracted by us from our perceptions and recollections, mere
denominations for the actual series of ‘psychic facts’. Time is thought
of by us before its parts, and temporal relations make possible the
events in time. Correspondingly it is necessary for the subject not to
be himself situated in it, in order to be able to be present in intention
to the past as to the future. Let us no longer say that time is a ‘datum
of consciousness’; let us be more precise and say that consciousness
unfolds or constitutes time. Through the ideal nature of time, it
ceases to be imprisoned in the present.

But does it enjoy an opening on to a past and a future? It is no
longer beset by the present and by ‘contents’, it travels freely from a
past and a future which are not far removed from it, since it consti¬
tutes them as past and future, and since they are its immanent
objects, to a present which is not near to it, since it is present only in
virtue of the relations which consciousness establishes between past,
present and future. But then has not a consciousness thus freed lost
all notion of what future, past and even present can possibly be? Is
not the time that it constitutes similar in every detail to the real time
the impossibility of which we have demonstrated; is it not a series of
instances of ‘now’, which are presented to nobody, since nobody is

414

TEMPORALITY

involved in them? Are we not always just as far away from under¬
standing what the future, the past and the present, and the passage
between them, can possibly be ? Time as the immanent object of a
consciousness is time brought down to one uniform level, in other
words it is no longer time at all. There can be time only if it is not
completely deployed, only provided that past, present and future do
not all three have their being in the same sense. It is of the essence of
time to be in process of self-production, and not to be; never, that is,
to be completely constituted. Constituted time, the series of possible
relations in terms of before and after, is not time itself, but the ulti¬
mate recording of time, the result of its passage, which objective
thinking always presupposes yet never manages to fasten on to. It is
spatial, since its moments co-exist spread out before thought1; it is a
present, because consciousness is contemporary with all times. It is a
setting distinct from me and unchanging, in which nothing either
elapses or happens. There must be another true time, in which I
learn the nature of flux and transience itself. It is indeed true that I
should be incapable of perceiving any point in. time without a before
and an after, and that, in order to be aware of the relationship be¬
tween the three terms, I must not be absorbed into any one of them:
that time, in short, needs a synthesis. But it is equally true that this
synthesis must always be undertaken afresh, and that any supposition
that it can be anywhere brought to completion involves the negation
of time. It is indeed the dream of philosophers to be able to conceive
art ‘eternity of life’, lying beyond permanence and change, in which
time's productivity is pre-eminently contained, and yet a thetic con¬
sciousness of time which stands above it and embraces it merely de¬
stroys the phenomenon of time. If we are in fact destined to make
contact with a sort of eternity, it will be at the core of our experience
of time, and not in some non-temporal subject whose function it is to
conceive and posit it. The problem is how to make time explicit as it
comes into being and makes itself evident, having the notion of time
at all times underlying it, and being, not an object of our knowledge,
but a dimension of our being.

It is in my ‘field of presence’ in the widest sense — this moment that

1 In order to arrive at authentic time, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to
condemn the spatialization of time as does Bergson, it is not necessary, since
time is exclusive of space only if we consider space as objectified in advance, and
ignore that primordial spatiality which we have tried to describe, and which is
the abstract form of our presence in the world. It is not sufficient since, even when
the systematic translation of time into spatial terms has been duly stigmatized,
we may still fall very far short of an authentic intuition of time. This is what
happened to Bergson. When he says that duration Snowballs upon itself, and
when he postulates memories in themselves accumulating in the unconscious, he
makes time out of a preserved present, and evolution out of what is evolved,

415

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

I am spending working along with, behind it, the horizon of the day
that has elapsed, and, in front of it, the evening and night — that I
make contact with time, and learn to know its course. The remote
past has also its temporal order, and its position in time in relation
to my present, but it has these in so far as it has been present itself,
that it has been ‘in its time’ traversed by my life, and carried for¬
ward to this moment. When I call up a remote past, I reopen time,
and carry myself back to a moment in which it still had before it a
future horizon now closed, and a horizon of the immediate past
which is today remote. Everything, therefore, causes me to revert to
the field of presence as the primary experience in which time and its
dimensions make their appearance unalloyed, with no intervening
distance and with absolute self-evidence. It is here that we see a future
sliding into the present and on into the past. Nor are these three
dimensions given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a mental
picture of my day, it weighs upon me with all its weight, it is still
there, and though I may not recall any detail of it, I have the impend¬
ing power to do so, I still ‘have it in hand’.1 In the same way, I do
not think of the evening to come and its consequences, and yet it ‘is
there’, like the back of a house of which I can see only the facade, or
like the background beneath a figure. Our future is not made up
exclusively of guesswork and daydreams. Ahead of what I can see
and perceive, there is, it is true, nothing more actually visible, but
my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out
in advance at least the style of what is to come (although we always
wait, perhaps to the day of our death, for the appearance of some¬
thing else). The present itself, in the narrow sense, is not posited. The
paper, my fountain-pen, are indeed there for me, but I do not ex¬
plicitly perceive them. I do not so much perceive objects as reckon
with an environment; I seek support in my tools, and am at my task
rather than confronting it. Husserl uses the terms protentions and
retentions for the intentionalities which anchor me to an environ¬
ment. They do not run from a central /, but from my perceptual field
itself, so to speak, which draws along in its wake its own horizon of
retentions, and bites into the future with its protentions. I do not pass
through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve
and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every
moment, its predecessor undergoes a change : I still have it in hand
and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of
presents ; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of
time. It is still the preceding moment, and I have the power to recap¬
ture it as it ;was just now; I am not cut off from it, but it would not

1 ‘Noch im Griff behalte’, Husserl, Vorlesungen zur Phanomenologie des inneren
Zeitbe wusstseins, pp. 390 and ff.

416

TEMPORALITY

belong to the past unless something had altered. It is beginning to be
outlined against, of projected upon, my present, whereas it was my
present a moment ago. When a third moment arrives, the second
undergoes a new modification; from being a retention it becomes the
retention of a retention, and the layer of time between it and me
thickens. One can, as Husserl does, represent this phenomenon dia-
grammatically. In order to make it complete, the symmetrical per¬
spective of protentions would have to be added. Time is not a line,
but a network of intentionalities.

From Husserl ( Zeitbewusstsein , p. 22). Horizontal line: series of ‘present
moments’. Oblique lines: Abschattungen of the same ‘present moments’
seen from an ulterior ‘present moment’. Vertical lines : Successive Abschatt¬
ungen of one and the same ‘present moment’.

It will doubtless be maintained that this description and this dia¬
gram do not bring us one step nearer to a solution. When we pass
from A to B, and then on to C, A is projected or outlined as A' and
then as A". For A' to be recognized as a retention or Abschattung of
A, and A" of A', and even for the transformation of A into A' to be
experienced as such, is there not needed an identifying synthesis link¬
ing A, A', A " and all other possible Abschattungen , and does this not
amount to making A into an ideal unity as Kant requires ? And yet
we know that with this intellectual synthesis there will cease to be any
time at all. A and all previous moments of time will indeed be identi¬
fiable by me, and I shall be in a way rescued from time which rims
them into one another and blurs their identity. But at the same time
I shall have lost all sense of before and after which is provided by
this flux, and nothing will any longer serve to distinguish the tem¬
poral sequence from spatial multiplicity. Husserl introduced the no¬
tion of retention, and held that I still have the immediate past in hand,
precisely for the purpose of conveying that I do not posit the past,
or construct it from an Abschattung really distinct from it and by
means of an express act ; but that I reach it in its recent, yet already
elapsed, thisness. What is given to me is not in the first place A', A",
or A nor do I go back from these ‘outlines’ to their original A, as

417

BEING -FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

one goes back from the sign to its significance. What is given to me
is A transparently visible through A', then the two through A", and
so on, as I see a pebble through the mass of water which moves over
it. There are certainly identifying syntheses, but only in the express
memory and voluntary recollection of the remote past, that is, in
those modes derived from consciousness of the past. For example, I
may be uncertain about the date of a memory: I have before me a
certain scene, let us suppose, and I do not know to what point of
time to assign it, the memory has lost its anchorage, and I may then
arrive at an intellectual identification based on the causal order of
events, for example, I had this suit made before the armistice, since
no more English cloth has been available ^ince then. But in this case
it is not the past itself that I reach. On the contrary, for when I re¬
discover the concrete origin of the memory, it is because it falls
naturally into a certain current of fear and hope running from
Munich to the outbreak of war; it is, therefore, because I recapture
time that is lost; because, from the moment in question to my pre¬
sent, the chain of retentions and the overlapping horizons coming
one after the other ensure an unbroken continuity. The objective
landmarks in relation to which I assign a place to my recollection in
the mediatory identification, and the intellectual synthesis generally,
have themselves a temporal significance only because gradually, step
by step, the synthesis of apprehension links me to my whole actual
past. There can, therefore, be no question of assimilating the latter
to the former. The fact that the Abschattungen A' and A" appear to
me as Abschattmgen of A, is not to be explained by the fact that they
all participate in an ideal unity A, which is their common ground.
It is because through them I obtain the point A itself, in its un¬
challengeable individuality, which is for ever established by its pas¬
sage into the present, and because I see springing from it the Abschat¬
tungen A', A" . . . In Husserl’s language, beneath the ‘intentionality
of the act’, which is the thetic consciousness of an object, and which,
in intellectual memory for example, converts ‘this’ into an idea, we
must recognize an ‘operative’ intentionality ( fungierende Intentionali-
tdt)1 which makes the former possible, and which is what Heidegger
terms transcendence. My present outruns itself in the direction of an
immediate future and an immediate past and impinges upon them
where they actually arc, namely in the past and in the future them¬
selves. If the past were available to us only in the form of express
recollections, we should be continually tempted to recall it in order
to verify its existence, and thus resemble the patient mentioned by
Scheler, who was constantly turning round in order to reassure

1 Husserl, Zeitbewusstsein , p. 430. Formate und transzendentale Logik, p. 208.
See Fink, Das Problem der Phdnomenologie Edmund Husserls , p. 286.

418

TEMPORALITY

himself that things were really there— -whereas in fact we feel it behind
us as an incontestable acquisition. In order to have a past or a future
we do not have to bring together, by means of an intellectual act, a
series of Abschattungen , for they possess a natural and primordial
unity, and what is announced through them is the past or the future
itself. Such is the paradox of what might be termed, with Husserl, the
‘passive synthesis’ of time1 — and of a term which is clearly not a
solution, but merely a pointer to the problem.

Light begins to be shed on the problem if we remember that our
diagram represents an instantaneous cross-section of time. What
there really is, is not a past, present and future, not discrete instants
A, B and C, nor really distinct Abschattungen A', A", B', nor finally a
host of retentions on the one hand and protentions on the other. The
upsurge of a fresh present does not cause a heaping up of the past
and remor of the future; the fresh present is the passage of future

L ent, and of former present to past, and when time begins to

, it moves throughout its whole length. The ‘instants’ A, B and
^ not successively in being , but differentiate themselves from each
other, and correspondingly A passes into A' and thence into A". In
short, the system of retentions collects into itself at each instant
what was, an instant earlier, the system of protentions. There is,
then, n not a multiplicity of linked phenomena, but one single pheno¬
menon of lapse. Time is the one single movement appropriate to it¬
self in all its parts, as a gesture includes all the muscular contractions
necessary for its execution. When we pass from B to C, there is, as it
were, a bursting, or a disintegration of B into B', of A' into A", and
C itself which, while it was on the way, announced its coming by a
continuous emission of Abschattungen , has no sooner come into
existence than it already begins to lose its substance. ‘Time is the
means offered to all that is destined to be, to come into existence in
order that it may no longer be.’2 It is nothing but a general flight out
of itself, the one law governing its centrifugal movements, or again,
as Heidegger says, an ek~stase. While B becomes C, it becomes also
B'; and simultaneously A which, while becoming B, had also be¬
come A', lapses into A". A, A' and A" on the one hand, and B and B'
on the other, are bound together, not by any identifying synthesis,
which would fix them at a point in time, but by a transitional syn¬
thesis (Ob ergangssyn th esis) , in so far as they issue one from the
other, and each of these projections is merely one aspect of the total
bursting forth or dehiscence. Hence time, in our primordial experi¬
ence of it, is not for us a system of objective positions, through which
we pass, but a mobile setting which moves away from us, like the

1 See, for example. Formate and Transzendentale Logik , pp. 256-7.

a Claudel, Art podtique, p. 57.

419

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BE1NG-IN-THE-W0RLD

landscape seen through a railway carriage window. Yet we do not
really believe that the landscape is moving; the gate-keeper at the
level crossing is whisked by, but the hill over there scarcely moves at
all, and in the same way, though the opening of my day is already
receding, the beginning of my week is a fixed point; an objective time
is taking shape on the horizon, and should therefore show up in my
immediate past. How is this possible? How is it that the temporal
ek-stase is not an absolute disintegration in which the individuality
of the moments disappears? It is because the disintegration undoes
what the passage from future to present had achieved: C is the cul¬
mination of a long concentration which has brought it to maturity;
as it was being built up, it made its approach known by progressively
fewer Abschattungen , for it was approaching bodily . When it came
into the present it brought with it its genesis, of which it was merely
the ultimate expression, and the impending presence of what was to
come after it. So that, when the latter comes into being and pushes C
into the past, C is not suddenly bereft of its being; its disintegration
is for fcver the inverse or the consequence of its coming to maturity.
In sho^f, since in time being and passing are synonymous, by becom¬
ing past), the event does not cease to be. The origin of objective time,
with its* fixed positions lying beneath our gaze, is not to be sought in
any eternal synthesis, but in the mutual harmonizing and overlapping
of past and future through the present, and in the very passing of
time. Time maintains what it has caused to be, at the very time it
expels it from being, because the new being was announced by its
predecessor as destined to be, and because, for the latter, to become
present was the same thing as being destined to pass away. ‘Tem-
poralization is not a succession (Nacheinander) of ecstases. The
future is not posterior to the past, or the past anterior to the present.
Temporality temporalizes itself as future-which-lapses-into-the-past-
by-coming-into-the-present.’ 1 Bergson was wrong in explaining the
unity of time in terms of its continuity, since that amounts to con¬
fusing past, present and future on the excuse that we pass from one to
the other by imperceptible transitions; in short, it amounts to deny¬
ing time altogether. But he was right to stick to the continuity of time
as an essential phenomenon. It is simply a matter of elucidating this.
Instant C arid instant D, however near they are together, are not
indistinguishable, for if they were there would be no time; what hap¬
pens is that they run into each other and C becomes D because C has
never been anything but the anticipation of D as present, and of its
own lapse into the past. This amounts to saying that each present
reasserts the presence of the whole past which it supplants, and
anticipates that of all that is to come, and that by definition the pre-
1 Heidegger, Seiti urtd Zeit, p. 350.

420

TEMPORALITY

sent is not shut up within itself, but transcends itself towards a future
and a past. What there is, is not a present, then another present which
takes its place in being, and not even a present with its vistas of past
and future followed by another present in which those vistas are dis¬
rupted, so that one and the same spectator is needed to effect the syn¬
thesis of successive perspectives: there is one single time which is
self-confirmatory, which can bring nothing into existence unless it
has already laid that thing’s foundations as present and eventual
past, and which establishes itself at a stroke.

The past, therefore, is not past, nor the future future. It exists only
when a subjectivity is there to disrupt the plenitude of being in itself,
to adumbrate a perspective, and introduce non-being into it. A past
and a future spring forth when I reach out towards them. I am not,
for myself, at this very moment, I am also at this morning or at the
night which will soon be here, and though my present is, if we wish
so to consider it, this instant, it is equally this day, this year or my
whole life. There is no need for a synthesis externally binding to¬
gether the tempora into one single time, because each one of the
tempora was already inclusive, beyond itself, of the whole open series
of other tempora , being in internal communication with them, and
because the ‘cohesion of a life’1 is given with its ek-stase . The passage
of one present to the next is not a thing which I conceive, nor do I see
it as an onlooker, I perform it; I am already at the impending present
as my gesture is already at its goal, I am myself time, a time which
‘abides’ and does not ‘flow’ or ‘change’, which is what Kant says in
various places.2 This idea of a time which anticipates itself is per¬
ceived by common sense in its way. Everyone talks about Time, not
as the zoologist talks about the dog or the horse, using these as col¬
lective nouns, but using it as a proper noun. Sometimes it is even per¬
sonified. Everyone thinks that there is here a single, concrete being,
wholly present in each of its manifestations, as is a man in each of his
spoken words. We say that there is time as we say that there is a
fountain: the water changes while the fountain remains because its
form is preserved ; the form is preserved because each successive wave
takes over the functions of its predecessor: from being the thrusting
wave in relation to the one in front of it, it becomes, in its turn and in
relation to another, the wave that is pushed ; and this is attributable
to the fact that, from the source to the fountain jet, the waves are not
separate; there is only one thrust, and a single air-lock in the flow
would be enough to break up the jet. Hence the justification for the
metaphpr of the river, not in so far as the river flows, but in so far as
it is one with itself. This intuition of time’s permanence, however, is

1 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit , p. 373.

2 Quoted by Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik , pp. 183-4.

421

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

jeopardized by the action of common sense, which thematizes or
objectifies it, which is the surest way of losing sight of it. There is
more truth in mythical personifications of time than in the notion of
time considered, in the scientific manner, as a variable of nature in
itself, or, in the Kantian manner, as a form ideally separable from
its matter. There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains
the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the
present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present
and even a past to come ; because, that is, each dimension of time is
treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because,
finally, there is at the core of time a gaze, or, as Heidegger puts it, an
Augen-blick , someone through whom the word as can have a meaning.
We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more
be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. We are saying that
time is someone, or that temporal dimensions, in so far as they per¬
petually overlap, bear each other out and ever confine themselves to
making explicit what was implied in each, being collectively expressive
of that one single explosion or thrust which is subjectivity itself. We
must understand time as the subject and the subject as time. What is
perfectly clear, is that this primordial temporality is not a juxta¬
position of external events, since it is the power which holds them to¬
gether while keeping them apart. Ultimate subjectivity is not tem¬
poral in the empirical sense of the term : if consciousness of time were
made up of successive states of consciousness, there would be needed
a new consciousness to be conscious of that succession and so on to
infinity. We are forced to recognize the existence of ‘a consciousness
having behind it no consciousness to be conscious of it’1 which,
consequently, is not arrayed out in time, and in which its ‘being
coincides with its being for itself’.2 We may say that ultimate con¬
sciousness is ‘timeless’ (. zeitlose ) in the sense that it is not intra-
temporal.3 ‘In’ my present, if I grasp it while it is still living and with
all that it implies, there is an ek-stase towards the future and towards
the past which reveals the dimensions of time not as conflicting, but
as inseparable: to be at present is to be always and for ever. Sub¬
jectivity is not in time because it takes up or lives through time, and
merges with the cohesion of a life.

Are we coming back in this way to a kind of eternity? I belong to
my past and, through the constant interlocking of retentions, I pre¬
serve my oldest experiences, which means not some duplicate or
image of them, but the experiences themselves, exactly as they were.

1 Husserl, Zeitbewusstsein> p. 442; ‘primares Bewusstsein . . . das hinter sich
kein Bewusstsein mehr hat in dem es bewusst ware . . .'

2 Ibid., p. 471: ‘fallt ja Sein und Innerlich-bewusstsein zusammen.’

3 Ibid., p. 464.

422

TEMPORALITY

But the unbroken chain of the fields of presence, by which I am
guaranteed access to the past itself, has the essential characteristic of
being formed only gradually and one step at a time; each present, in
virtue of its very essence as a present, rules out the juxtaposition of
other presents and, even in the context of a time long past, I can take
in a certain period of my past life only by unfolding it anew according
to its own tempo. The temporal perspective with its confusion of
what is far removed in time, and that sort of ‘shrinkage’ of the past
with oblivion as its ultimate limit, are not accidents of memory, and
do not express the debasement into empirical existence of a con¬
sciousness of time theoretically all-embracing, but its initial am¬
biguity: to retain is to hold, but at a distance. Once again, time’s
‘synthesis’ is a transitional synthesis, the action of a life which un¬
folds, and there is no way of bringing it about other than by living
that life, there is no seat of time; time bears itself on and launches it¬
self afresh. Time as an indivisible thrust and transition can alone
make possible time as successive multiplicity, and what we place at
the origin of intratemporality is a constituting time. When we were
engaged above in describing the overlapping of time by itself, we were
able to treat the future as a past only by qualifying it as a past to
come, and the past as a future only by calling it a future which has
occurred; this means that when we came to put all time on the same
footing, we had to reassert the originality of each perspective, and
derive this quasi-eternity from the event. What does not elapse in
time is the lapse of time itself. Time restarts itself: the rhythmic cycle
and constant form of yesterday, today and tomorrow may well create
the illusion that we possess it immediately, in its entirety, as the
fountain creates in us a feeling of eternity. But the generality of time
is no more than one of its secondary attributes and provides only an
inauthentic view of it, since we cannot get as far as conceiving a cycle
without drawing a distinction, in terms of time, between the point of
arrival and the point of departure. The feeling for eternity is a hypo¬
critical one, for eternity feeds on time. The fountain retains its
identity only because of the continuous pressure of water. Eternity is
the time that belongs to dreaming, and the dream refers back to
waking life, from which it borrows all its structures. Of what nature,
then, is that waking time in which eternity takes root? It is the field of
presence in the wide sense, with its double horizon or primary past
and future, and the infinite openness of those fields of presence that
have slid by, or are still possible. Time exists for me only because I
am situated in it, that is, because I become aware of myself as already
committed to it, because the whole of being is not given to me in¬
carnate, and finally because one sector of being is so close to me that
it does not even make up a picture before me — I cannot see it, just as

423

BEING-FOR-TTSELF AND BEING -IN-THE-WORLD

I cannot see my face. Time exists for me because I have a present. It
is by coming into the present that a moment of time acquires that
indestructible individuality, that ‘once and for all* quality, which
subsequently enables it to make its way through time and produce
in us the illusion of eternity. No one of time’s dimensions can be de¬
duced from the rest. But the present (in the wide sense, along with its
horizons of primary past and future), nevertheless enjoys a privilege
because it is the zone in which being and consciousness coincide.
When I recall an earlier perception, or when I imagine a visit to my
friend Paul who is in Brazil, my aim, it is true, is the past itself in its
true place, or Paul himself in the world, and not some interposed
mental object. Nevertheless my act of representation, unlike the
experiences represented, is actually present to me; the former is per¬
ceived, the latter are merely represented. Either a former or a poten¬
tial experience, in order that they may appear to me, need to be
borne into being by a primary consciousness, which in this case is my
inner perception of recollection or imagination. We said above that
we need to arrive at a consciousness with no other behind it, wliich
grasps its own being, and in which, in short, being and being co-
scious are one and the same thing. This ultimate consciousness is
not an eternal subject perceiving itself in absolute transparency, for
any such subject would be utterly incapable of making its descent into
time, and would, therefore have nothing in common with our experi¬
ence : it is the consciousness of the present. In the present and in per¬
ception, my being and my consciousness are at one, not that my
being is reducible to the knowledge I have of it or that it is clearly set
out before me — on the contrary perception is opaque, for it brings
into play, beneath what I know, my sensory fields which are my
primitive alliance with the world — but because ‘to be conscious’ is
here nothing but ‘to belong to’, and because my consciousness of
existing merges into the actual gesture of ‘ex-sistence’.1 It is by com¬
municating with the world that we communicate beyond all doubt
with ourselves. We hold time in its entirety, and we are present to
ourselves because we are present to the world.

That being the case, and since consciousness takes root in being
and time by taking up a situation, how are we then to describe it? It
must be a comprehensive project, or a view of time and the world
which, in order to be apparent to itself, and in order to become ex¬
plicitly what it is implicitly, that is, consciousness, needs to unfold
itself into multiplicity. We must avoid conceiving as real and dis¬
tinct entities either the indivisible power, or its distinct manifestations ;
consciousness is neither, it is both; it is the very action of time-

1 We borrow this expression from H. Corbin, Qu'est-ce que la Metaphysique ?,
p. 14.

424

TTMPORALITY

creation * — of ‘flux’, as Husserl has it — a self-anticipatory move¬
ment, a flow which never leaves itself. Let us try to give a better
description with the help of an example. The novelist or psychologist
who fails to go back to ultimate origins and accepts time-creation as
something ready made, sees consciousness as a multiplicity of
psychic facts among which he tries to establish causal relations. For
example,1 Proust shows how Swann’s love for Odette causes the
jealousy which, in turn, modifies his love, since Swann, always anxi¬
ous to win her from any possible rival, has no time really to look at
Odette. In reality, Swann’s consciousness is not a lifeless setting in
which psychic facts are produced from outside. What we have is not
jealousy aroused by love and exerting its own counter-influence, but
a certain way of loving in which the whole destiny of that love can be
discerned at a glance. Swann has a liking for Odette’s person, for
that ‘spectacle’ that she is, for her way of looking, of modulating her
voice, and for the way a smile comes to her lips. But what is having a
liking for someone ? Proust tells us when speaking of another love : it
is the feeling of being shut out of the life of the beloved, and of want¬
ing to force one’s way in and take complete possession of it. Swann’s
love does not cause him to feel jealousy. It is jealousy already, and
has been from the start. Jealousy does not produce a change in the
quality of love : Swann’s feeling of pleasure in looking at Odette bore
its degeneration within itself, since it was the pleasure of being the
only one to do so. The set of psychic facts and causal relationships is
merely an outward manifestation of a certain view that Swann takes
of Odette, a certain way of belonging to another. Swann’s jealous love
ought, moreover, to be related to the rest of his behaviour, in which
case it might well appear as itself a manifestation of an even more
general existential structure, which would be Swann’s whole per¬
sonality. Conversely all consciousness as a comprehensive project is
outlined or made manifest to itself in those acts, experiences and
‘psychic facts’ in which it is recognized. Here is where temporality
throws light on subjectivity. We shall never manage to understand
how a thinking or constituting subject is able to posit or become
aware of itself in time. If the I is indeed the transcendental Ego of
Kant, we shall never understand how it can in any instance merge
with its wake in the inner sense, or how the empirical self still remains
a self. If, however, the subject is identified with temporality, then
self-positing ceases to be a contradiction, because it exactly expresses
the essence of living time. Time is ‘the affecting of self by self’:2 what
* ‘temporalization’; cf. ‘Zeitigung* (Translator’s note).

1 The example is J. P. Sartre’s in U£tre e t le N4antt p. 216.

2 The expression is applied by Kant to the Gemiit* Heidegger transfers it to
time: ‘Die Zeit is Shrem Wesen nach reine Aflekiion ihrer seibst.’ Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik, pp. 180-1.

425

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

exerts the effect is time as a thrust and a passing towards a future;
what is affected is time as an unfolded series of presents ; the affecting
agent and affected recipient are one, because the thrust of time is
nothing but the transition from one present to another. This ek-stase ,
this projection of an indivisible power into an outcome which is
already present to it, is subjectivity. The primary flow, says Husserl,
does not confine itself to being: it must necessarily provide itself with
a ‘manifestation of itself’ (Selbsterscheinung), without our needing to
place behind it a second flow which is conscious of it. It ‘constitutes
itself as a phenomenon in itself’.1 It is of the essence of time to be not
only actual time, or time which flows, but also time which is aware of
itself, for the explosion or dehiscence of the present towards a future
is the archetype of the relationship of self to self and it shows up an
interiority or ipseity.2 Here a light bursts forth,3 for here we are no
longer concerned with a being which reposes within itself, but with a
being the whole essence of which, like that of light, is to make visible .
It is through temporality that there can be, without contradiction,
ipseity, significance and reason. That is seen even in the commonly
held notion of time. We mark out the phases or stages of our life; for
example, we consider everything that bears a significant relationship
to our concerns at the moment as part of our present, thus recogniz¬
ing implicitly that time and significance are but one thing. Sub¬
jectivity is not motionless identity with itself : as with time, it is of its
essence, in order to be genuine subjectivity, to open itself to an Other
and to go forth from itself. We must not envisage the subject as con¬
stituting, and the multiplicity of its experiences or Erlebnisse as con¬
stituted; we must not treat the transcendental Ego as the true subject
and the empirical self as its shadow or its wake. If that were their
relationship to each other, we could withdraw into the constituting
agency, and such reflection would destroy time, which would be left
without date or place. The fact that even our purest reflection appears
to us as retrospective in time, and that our reflection on the flux is
actually inserted into that flux,4 shows that the most precise con¬
sciousness of which we are capable is always, as it were, affected by
itself or given to itself, and that the word consciousness has no mean¬
ing independently of this duality.

Nothing said of the subject is false: it is true that the subject as an
absolute presence to itself is something we cannot circumvent, and

1 Husserl, Zeitbewusstsein> p. 436.

2 Heidegger, op. cit., p. 181 : ‘Als reine Selbstaffektion bildet (die Zeit) urspriing-
lich die endliche Selbstheit dergestalt dass das Selbst so etwas wie Selbstbewusst-
sein kann.’

3 Heidegger refers somewhere to the ‘Gelichtetheit’ of the Dasein.

4 What Husserl, in his unpublished writings, terms: Einstromen .

426

TEMPORALITY

that nothing could happen to it of which it did not bear within itself
the lineaments. It is also true that it provides itself with symbols of
itself in both succession and multiplicity, and that these symbols are
it, since without them it would, like an inarticulate cry, fail to achieve
selfconsciousness. It is here that what we provisionally termed the
passive synthesis becomes clarified. A passive synthesis is a contra¬
diction in terms if the synthesis is a process of composition, and if the
passivity consists in being the recipient of multiplicity instead of its
composer^Wfiat we meant by passive synthesis was that we make our
way into multiplicity, but that we do not synthesize it* Now time-
creation, or temporalization, satisfies by its very nature these two
conditions: it is indeed clear that I am not the creator of time any
more than of my heart-beats. I am not the initiator of the process of
temporalization ; I did not choose to come into the world, yet once I
am bom, time flows through me, whatever I do. Nevertheless this
ceaseless welling up of time is not a simple fact to which I am
passively subjected, for 1 can find a remedy against it in itself, as
happens in a decision which binds me or in the act of establishing a
concept. It withholds me from what I was about to become, and at
the same time provides me with the means of grasping myself at a
distance and establishing my own reality as myself. What is called
passivity is not the acceptance by us of an alien reality, or a causal
action exerted upon us from outside: it is being encompassed, being
in a situation — prior to which we do not exist — which we are per¬
petually resuming and which is constitutive of us. A spontaneity
'acquired' once and for all, and one which 'perpetuates itself in being
in virtue of its being acquired* 1 is nothing other than time and sub¬
jectivity. It is time, since a time without its roots in a present and
thence a past would no longer be time, but eternity. Heidegger's his¬
torical time, which flows from the future and which, thanks to its
resolute decision, has its future in advance and rescues itself once and
for all from disintegration, is impossible within the context of Hei¬
degger's thought itself: for, if time is an ek-stase, if present and past
are two results of this ek*stase, how could we ever cease to see time
from the point of view of the present, and how could we finally escape
from the inauthentic? It is always in the present that we are centred,
and our decisions start from there; they can therefore always be
brought into relationship with our past, and are never motiveless,
and, though they may open up a cycle in our life which is entirely
new, they still have to be subsequently carried forward, and afford
only a temporary reprieve from dispersion. There can therefore be
no question of deriving time from spontaneity. We are not temporal

1 J. P. Sartre, UEtre et le Neant , p. 195. The author mentions this monster only
to banish the very idea of it.

427

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

beings because we are spontaneous and because, as consciousnesses,
we tear ourselves away from ourselves. On the contrary, time is the
foundation and measure of our spontaneity, and the power of out¬
running and of ‘neantiser’ * which dwells within us and is ourselves,
is itself given to us with temporality and life. Our birth, or, as
Husserl has it in his unpublished writings, our ‘generativity’, is the
basis both of our activity or individuality, and our passivity or
generality — that inner weakness which prevents us from ever achiev¬
ing the density of an absolute individual. We are not in some incom¬
prehensible way an activity joined to a passivity, an automatism
surmounted by a will, a perception surmounted by a judgement, but
wholly active and wholly passive, because we are the upsurge of time.

We have been concerned1 with gaining an understanding of the
relationships between consciousness and nature, between inside and
outside ourselves. Or again, the problem was to link the idealist per¬
spective, according to which nothing exists except as an object for
consciousness, and the realist perspective, according to which con¬
sciousnesses are introduced into the stuff of the objective world and
of events in themselves. Or finally, we were concerned with finding
out how the world and man are accessible to two kinds of investiga¬
tion, in the first case explanatory and in the second reflective. We
have already, in another work, set out these traditional problems in
another language which strips away all inessentials: the whole ques¬
tion is ultimately one of understanding what, in ourselves and in the
world, is the relation between significance and absence of significance .
Is the element of significance which is evident in the world produced
and carried forward by the assemblage or convergence of independent
facts or, on the other hand, is it merely the expression of an absolute
reason? We say that events have a significance when they appear as
the achievement or the expression of a single aim. There is significance
for us when one of our intentions is fulfilled, or conversely when a
number of facts or signs lend themselves in such a way as to enable
us to take them up as an inclusive whole and carry them forward, or,
at all events, when several terms exist as . . . representative or ex¬
pressive of something other than themselves. It is characteristic of
idealism to grant that all significance is centrifugal, being an act of
significance or Sinn-gebungy 2 and that there are no natural signs. To
understand is ultimately always to construct, to constitute, to bring
about here and now the synthesis of the object. Our analysis of one’s
own body and of perception has revealed to us a relation to the object,

* producing a negative entity (Translator’s note).

1 Cf. La Structure du Comportement, Introd.

2 The expression is again often used by Husserl, for example Ideen, p. 107.

428

TEMPORALITY

i.e. a significance deeper than this. The thing is nothing but a signifi¬
cance, the significance ‘thing’. Very well. But when I understand a
thing, a picture for example, I do not here and now effect its syn¬
thesis, I come to it bringing my sensory fields and my perceptual field
with me, and in the last resort I bring a schema of all possible being,
a universal setting in relation to the world. At the heart of the subject
himself we discovered, then, the presence of the world, so that the
subject was no longer to be understood as a synthetic activity, but as
ek-stase , and that every active process of signification or Sinn-gebung
appeared as derivative and secondary in relation to that fertility of
meaning with which signs, which might serve merely to delimit the
world, are endowed. We found beneath intentionality related to acts,
or thetic intentionality, another kind which is the condition of the
former’s possibility: namely an operative intentionality already at
work before any positing or any judgement, a ‘Logos of the aesthetic
world’,1 an ‘art hidden in the depths of the human soul’, one which,
like any art, is known only in its results. From this point onwards the
distinction made by us elsewhere between structure and significance2
began to be clarified: what constitutes the difference between the
Gestalt of the circle and the significance ‘circle’, is that the latter is
recognized by an understanding which engenders it as the abode of
points equidistant from a centre, the former by a subject familiar with
his world and able to seize it as a modulation of that world, as a
circular physiognomy. We have no way of knowing what a picture or
a thing is other than by looking at them, and their significance is re¬
vealed only if we look at them from a certain point of view, from a
certain distance and in a certain direction* in short only if we place,
at the service of the spectacle, our collusion with the world. The
phrase ‘direction of a stream’ is meaningless unless I visualize a sub¬
ject looking from one place towards another. In the world in itself,
all directions and all movement are relative, which amounts to saying
that there are none at all. There would in fact be no movement, and I
should have no notion of it, if, in perception^f-did not leave the
earth, as my ‘ground’3 of all rest and motion on the hither side of
rest and motion, because I inhabit it, and similarly there would be no
direction without a being who inhabits the world and who, through
the medium of his gaze, marks out the first direction as a basis for

1 Husserl, Formale und transzendentaie Logik, p. 257. ‘Aesthetic’ is, naturally,
taken in the wide sense of ‘transcendental aesthetic’.

2 La Structure du Comportement , p. 302.

3 ‘Boden’, Husserl, Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre (unpublished).

* The argument is here, and in the following sentences, conducted by exploiting
different meanings of the French word sens (meaning, direction, sense) which are
not covered by one single word in English (Translator’s note).

429

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

all others. In the same way, the face or back of a piece of material is
intelligible only for a subject who can approach the object from
either side, so that it is through my upsurge into the world that the
material has a face or back. Similarly again, the meaning of a sen¬
tence is its import or intention, which once more presupposes a de¬
parture and arrival point, an aim and a point of view. And finally the
sense of sight is a certain preparation for the logic, and for the world,
of colours. In all uses of the word sens , we find the same fundamental
notion of a being orientated or polarized in the direction of what he
is not, and thus we are always brought back to a conception of the
subject as ek-stase> and to a relationship of active transcendence be¬
tween the subject and the world. The world is inseparable from the
subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world,
and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world
which it projects itself. The subject is a being-in-the-world and the
world remains ‘subjective’1 since its texture and articulations are in¬
dicated by the subject’s movement of transcendence. Hence we dis¬
covered, with the world as the cradle of meanings, the direction of all
directions, and ground of all thinking, how to leave behind the
dilemma of realism and idealism, contingency and absolute reason,
nonsense and sense. The world as we have tried to show it, as stand¬
ing on the horizon of our life as the primordial unity of all our experi¬
ences, and one goal of all our projects, is no longer the visible unfold¬
ing of a constituting Thought, not a chance conglomeration of parts,
nor, of course, the working of a controlling Thought on an indifferent
matter, but the native abode of all rationality.

Our analysis of time has confirmed, initially, this new notion of
significance and understanding. Considering it in the same light as
any other object, we shall be obliged to say of it what we have said of
other objects : that it has meaning for us only because it is ‘what we
are’. We can designate something by this word only because we
belong to past, present and future. It is literally the tenor * of our
life, and, like the world, is accessible only to the person who has his
place within it, and who follows its direction. But the analysis of
time has not merely provided an opportunity of reiterating what had
been said about the world. It throws light on the preceding analysis
because it discloses subject and object as two abstract ‘moments’ of a
unique structure which is presence. It is through time that being is
conceived, because it is through the relations of time-subject and

1 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit , p. 366: ‘Wenn das “Subjekt” ontologisch als
existierendes Dasein begriffen wird, deren Sein in der Zeitlichkeit griindet, dann
muss gesagt werden: Welt ist “subjektiv”. Diese “subjektive” Welt aber is dann
als Zeittranszendente “objektiver” als jedes mogliche “Objekt’V

* sens (Translator’s note).

430

TEMPORALITY

time-object that we are able to understand those obtaining between
subject and world. Let us apply to those problems we began with the
idea of subjectivity as temporality. We wondered, for example, how
to conceive the relations between the soul and the body, rejecting as
hopeless any attempt to tie up t h&for-itself with a certain object in-
itself \ to which it is supposed to stand in a relationship of causal
dependence. But if the for-itself the revelation of self to self, is merely
the hollow in which time is formed, and if the world in itself is simply
the horizon of my present, then the problem is reduced to the form:
How is it that a being which is still to come, and has passed by, also
has a present — which means that the problem is eliminated, since the
future, the past and the present are linked together in the movement
of time-creation. It is as much of my essence to have a body as it is
the future’s to be the future of a certain present. So that neither
scientific thematization nor objective thought can discover a single
bodily function strictly independent of existential structures,1 or
conversely a single “spiritual’ act which does not rest on a bodily in¬
frastructure. Moreover, it is essential to me not only to have a body,
but to have this body. It is not only the notion of the body which,
through that of the present, is necessarily linked to that of the for-
itself; the actual existence of my body is indispensable to that of my
‘consciousness’: In the last analysis, in so far as I know that the for-
itself is the culmination of a body, this can be only through the ex¬
perience of my one body and on sfor-itself or through the experience
of my presence in the world. It will be objected that I might have
nails, ears or lungs of some other kind which would involve no
change in my existence. But then my nails, ears and lungs taken
separately have no existence. It is science which has accustomed us to
regard the body as a collection of parts, and also the experience of its
disintegration at death. But the fact is that a decomposed body is no
longer a body. When I restore my ears, nails and lungs to my living
body, they no longer appear in the light of contingent details. They
are not indifferent to the idea that others form of me, contributing
as they do to my physiognomy or my general bearing, and it is not
impossible that science may tomorrow express in the form of objec¬
tive correlations precisely how necessary it was that I should have
that kind of ears, nails and lungs, and whether, moreover, I was
destined to be dexterous or clumsy, placid or highly strung, intelli¬
gent or stupid, in short whether I was destined to be myself. In other
words, as we have shown elsewhere, the objective body is not the
true version of the phenomenal body, that is, the true version of the
body that we live by; it is indeed no more than the latter’s im¬
poverished image, so that the problem of the relation of soul to body
1 We demonstrated this at length in La Structure du Comportement.

431

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

has nothing to do with the objective body, which exists only con¬
ceptually, but with the phenomenal body. What is true, however, is
that our open and personal existence rests on an initial foundation of
acquired and stabilized existence* But it could not be otherwise, if
we are temporality, since the dialectic of acquisition and future is
what constitutes time.

Our replies would be on the same lines to any questions that might
be raised concerning the world before man’s appearance on it. To
our assertion above that there is no world without an Existence that
sustains its structure, it might have been retorted that the world
nevertheless preceded man, that the earth, to all appearances, is the
only inhabited planet, and that philosophical views are thus shown
to be incompatible with the most firmly established facts. But in fact,
it is only intellectualist, abstract reflection which is incompatible with
misconceived ‘facts’. For what precisely is meant by saying that the
world existed before any human consciousness ? An example of what
is meant is that the earth originally issued from a primitive nebula
from which the combination of conditions necessary to life was
absent. But every one of these words, like every equation in physics,
presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this refer¬
ence to the world in which we live goes to make up the proposition’s
valid meaning. Nothing will ever bring home to my comprehension
what a nebula that no one sees could possibly be. Laplace’s nebula is
not behind us, at our remote beginnings, but in front of us in the
cultural world. What, in fact, do we mean when we say that there is
no world without a being in the world ? Not indeed that the world is
constituted by consciousness, but on the contrary that consciousness
always finds itself already at work in the world. What is true, taking
one thing with another, is that there is a nature, which is not that of
the sciences, but that which perception presents to me, and that even
the light of consciousness is, as Heidegger says, lumen naturale> given
to itself.

At*all events, the critic may continue, the world will outlast me,
and other men will perceive it when I am no longer here. Now is it
not impossible for me to conceive, either after me, or even during my
lifetime, other men in the world, if indeed my presence in the world
is the condition of the world’s possibility ? In the perspective of time-
creation, light is thrown on the remarks made above about the
problem of other people. We said that in the perception of other
people I cover in intention the infinite distance which stands between
my subjectivity and another, I overcome the impossibility of con¬
ceiving another for-himself for me, because I witness another be¬
haviour, another presence in the world. Now that we have more
effectively analysed the notion of presence, linked together presence

432

TEMPORALITY

to oneself and presence in the world, and identified the cogito with
involvement in the world, we arc in a better position to understand
how we can find others at the intentional origin of their visible be¬
haviour. It is true that the other person will never exist for us as we
exist ourselves; he is always a lesser figure, and we never feel in him
as we do in ourselves the thrust of time-creation. But two temporali¬
ties are not mutually exclusive as are two consciousnesses, because
each one arrives at self-knowledge only by projecting itself into the
present where both can be joined together. As my living present
opens upon a past which I nevertheless am no longer living through,
and on a future which I do not yet live, and perhaps never shall, it can
also open on to temporalities outside my living experience and
acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded to
the dimensions of that collective history which my private existence
takes up and carries forward. The solution of all problems of tran¬
scendence is to be sought in the thickness of the pre-objective present,
in which we find our bodily being, our social being, and the pre¬
existence of the world, that is, the starting point of ‘explanations9, in
so far as they are legitimate — and at the same time the basis of our
freedom.

433

FREEDOM

AGAIN, it is clear that no causal relationship is conceivable be¬
tween the subject and his body, his world or his society. Only at the
cost of losing the basis of alt my certainties can I question what is
conveyed to me by my presence to myself. Now the moment I turn to
myself in order to describe myself, l have a glimpse of an anonymous
flux,1 a comprehensive project in which there are so far no ‘states of
consciousness’, nor, a fortiori , qualifications of any sort. For myself
I am neither ‘jealous’, nor ‘inquisitive’, nor ‘hunchbacked’, nor ‘a
civil servant’. It is often a matter of surprise that the cripple or the
invalid can put up with himself. The reason is that such people are
not for themselves deformed or at death’s door. Until the final coma,
the dying man is inhabited by a consciousness, he is all that he sees,
and enjoys this much of an outlet. Consciousness can never objectify
itself into invalid-consciousness or cripple-consciousness, and even
if the old man complains of his age or the cripple of his deformity,
they can do so only by comparing themselves with others, or seeing
themselves through the eyes of others, that is, by taking a statistical
and objective view of themselves, so that such complaints are never
absolutely genuine: when he is back in the heart of his own con¬
sciousness, each one of us feels beyond liis 1 imitations and thereupon
resigns himself to them. They are the price which we automatically
pay for being in the world, a formality which we take for granted.
Hence v/e may speak disparagingly of our looks and still not want to
change our face for another. No idiosyncrasy can, seemingly, be
attached to the insuperable generality of consciousness, nor can any
limit be set to this immeasurable power of escape. In order to be
determined (in the two senses of that word) by an external factor, it
is necessary that I should be a thing. Neither my freedom nor my
universality can admit of any eclipse. It is inconceivable that I should
be free in certain of my actions and determined in others: how
1 In the sense in which, with Husserl, we have taken this word.

434

FREEDOM

should we understand, a dormant freedom that gave full scope to
determinism ? And if it is assumed that it is snuffed out when it is not
in action, how could it be rekindled ? If per impossibile I had once
succeeded in making myself into a thing, how should I subsequently
reconvert myself to consciousness? Once I am free, I am not to be
counted among things, and I must then be uninterruptedly free. Once
my actions cease to be mine, I shall never recover them, and if I lose
my hold on the world, it will never be restored to me. It is equally in¬
conceivable that my liberty should be attenuated ; one cannot be to
some extent free, and if, as is often said, motives incline me in a cer¬
tain direction, one of two things happens: either they are strong
enough to force me to act, in which case there is no freedom, or else
they are not strong enough, and then freedom is complete, and as
great in the worst torments as in the peace of one’s home. We ought,
therefore, to reject not only the idea of causality r but also that of
motivation.1 The alleged motive does not burden my decision; on the
contrary my decision lends the motive its force. Everything that I
‘am’ in virtue of nature or history — hunchbacked, handsome or
Jewish — I never am completely for myself, as we have just explained :
and I may well be these things for other people, nevertheless I remain
free to posit another person as a consciousness whose views strike
through to my very being, or on the other hand merely as an object.
It is also true that this option is itself a form of constraint : if I am
ugly, I have the choice between being an object of disapproval or dis¬
approving of others. I am left free to be a masochist or a sadist, but
not free to ignore others. But this dilemma, which is given as part of
the human lot, is not one for me as pure consciousness : it is still I
who cause the other to be for me, and who cause us both to be as
members of mankind. Moreover, even if existence as a human being
were imposed upon me, the manner alone being left to my choice, and
considering this choice itself and ignoring the small number of forms
it might take, it would still be a free choice. If it is said that my tem¬
perament inclines me particularly to either sadism or masochism, it is
stiil merely a manner of speaking, for my temperament exists only for
the second order knowledge that I gain about myself when I see my¬
self as others see me, and in so far as I recognize it, confer value upon
it, and in that sense, choose it. What misleads us on this, is that we
often look for freedom in the voluntary deliberation which examines
one motive after another and seems to opt for the weightiest or most
convincing. In reality the deliberation follows the decision, and it is
my secret decision which brings the motives to light, for it would be
difficult to conceive what the force of a motive might be in the absence
of a decision which it confirms or to which it runs counter. When I
1 See J. P. Sartre, VBtre et le Niant , pp. 508 and ff.

435

BEING-F0R-1TSELF AND BEING-1N-THE-W0RLD

have abandoned a project, the motives which I thought held me to it
suddenly lose their force and collapse. In order to resuscitate them,
an effort is required on my part to reopen time and set me back to the
moment preceding the making of the decision. Even while I am de¬
liberating, already I find it an effort to suspend time’s flow, and to
keep open a situation which I feel is closed by a decision which is
already there and which 1 am holding off. That is why it so often
happens that after giving up a plan 1 experience a feeling of relief:
‘After all, I wasn’t so very particular’ ; the debate was purely a matter
of form, and the deliberation a mere parody, for 1 had decided against
from the start.

We often see the weakness of the will brought forward as an argu¬
ment against freedom. And indeed, although I can will myself to
adopt a course of conduct and act the part of a warrior or a seducer,
it is not within my power to be a warrior or seducer with ease and in
a way that ‘comes naturally’; really to be one, that is. But neither
should we seek freedom in the act of will, which is, in its very mean¬
ing, something short of an act. We have recourse to an act of will
only in order to go against our true decision, and, as it were, for the
purpose of proving our powerlessness. If we had really and truly
made the conduct of the warrior or the seducer our own, then we
should be one or the other. Even what are called obstacles to freedom
are in reality deployed by it. An unclimbable rock face, a large or
small, vertical or slanting rock, arc things which have no meaning
for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, for a subject
whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the
uniform mass of the in itself and cause an orientated world to arise —
a significance in things. There is, then, ultimately nothing that can
set limits to freedom, except those limits that freedom itself has set in
the form of its various initiatives, so that the subject has simply the
external world that he gives himself. Since it is the latter who, on
coming into being, brings to light significance and value in things,
and since no thing can impinge upon it except through acquiring,
thanks to it, significance and value, there is no action of things on
the subject, but merely a signification (in the active sense), a centrifu¬
gal Sinngebtmg. The choice would seem to lie between scientism’s
conception of causality, which is incompatible with the consciousness
which we have of ourselves, and the assertion of an absolute freedom
divorced from the outside. It is impossible to decide beyond which
point things cease to be efirjfuv. Either they all lie within our power,
or none does.

The result, however, of this first reflection on freedom would
appear to be to rule it out altogether. If indeed it is the case that our
freedom is the same in all our actions, and even in our passions, if it

436

FREEDOM

is not to be measured in terms of our conduct, and if the slave dis¬
plays freedom as much by living in fear as by breaking his chains,
then it cannot be held that there is such a thing as free action , freedom
being anterior to all actions. In any case it will not be possible to de¬
clare: ‘Here freedom makes its appearance’, since free action, in
order to be discernible, has to stand out against a background of life
from which it is entirely, or almost entirely, absent. We may say in
this case that it is everywhere, but equally nowhere. In the name of
freedom we reject the idea of acquisition, since freedom has become
a primordial acquisition and, as it were, our state of nature. Since we
do not have to provide it, it is the gift granted to us of having no gift,
it is the nature of consciousness which consists in having no nature,
and in no case can it find external expression or a place in our life.
The idea of action, therefore, disappears : nothing can pass from us
to the world, since we are nothing that can be specified, and since the
non-being which constitutes us could not possibly find its way into
the world’s plenum. There are merely intentions immediately fol¬
lowed by their effects, and we are very near to the Kantian idea of an
intention which is tantamount to the act, which Scheler countered
with the argument that the cripple who would like to be able to save
a drowning man and the good swimmer who actually saves him do
not have the same experience of autonomy. The very idea of choice
vanishes, for to choose is to choose something in which freedom sees,
at least for a moment, a symbol of itself. There is free choice only if
freedom comes into play in its decision, and posits the situation
chosen as a situation of freedom. A freedom which has no need to
be exercised because it is already acquired could not commit itself in
this way: it knows that the following instant will find it, come what
may, just as free and just as indeterminate. The very notion of free¬
dom demands that our decision should plunge into the future, that
something should have been done by it, that the subsequent instant
should benefit from its predecessor and, though not necessitated,
should be at least required by it. If freedom is doing, it is necessary
that what it does should not be immediately undone by a new free¬
dom. Each instant, therefore, must not be a closed world; one in¬
stant must be able to commit its successors and, a decision once taken
and action once begun, I must have something acquired at my dis¬
posal, I must benefit from my impetus, I must be inclined to carry on,
and there must be a bent or propensity of the mind. It was Descartes
who held that conservation demands a power as great as does crea¬
tion; a view which implies a realistic notion of the instant. It is true
that the instant is not a philosopher’s fiction. It is the point at which
one project is brought to fruition and another begun1 — the point at
1 J. P. Sartre, V£tre et le Niant , p, 544.

437

BEING-FOR-1TSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

which ray gaze is transferred from one end to another, it is the Augen-
Blick. But this break in time cannot occur unless each of the two
spans is of a piece. Consciousness, it is said, is, though not atomized
into instants, at least haunted by the spectre of the instant which it is
obliged continually to exorcise by a free act. We shall soon see that
we have indeed always the power to interrupt, but it implies in any
case a power to begin , for there would be no severance unless freedom
had taken up its abode somewhere and were preparing to move it.
Unless there are cycles of behaviour, open situations requiring a cer¬
tain completion and capable of constituting a background to either
a confirmatory or transformatory decision, we never experience free¬
dom. The choice of an intelligible character is excluded, not only be¬
cause there is no time anterior to time, but because choice pre¬
supposes a prior commitment and because the idea of an initial
choice involves a contradiction. If freedom is to have room * in
which to move, if it is to be describable as freedom, there must be
something to hold it away from its objectives, it must have a field,
which means that there must be for it special possibilities, or realities
which tend to cling to being. As J. P. Sartre himself observes, dream¬
ing is incompatible with freedom because, in the realm of imagina¬
tion, we have no sooner taken a certain significance as our goal than
we already believe that we have intuitively brought it into being, in
short, because there is no obstacle and nothing to do.1 It is estab¬
lished that freedom is not to be confused with those abstract de¬
cisions of will at grips with motives or passions, for the classical con¬
ception of deliberation is relevant only to a freedom ‘in bad faith’
which secretly harbours antagonistic motives without being prepared
to act on them, and so itself manufactures the alleged proofs of its
impotence. We can see, beneath these noisy debates and these fruit¬
less efforts to ‘construct’ us, the tacit decisions whereby we have
marked out round ourselves the field of possibility, and it is true that
nothing is done as long as we cling to these fixed points, and every¬
thing is easy as soon as we have weighed anchor. This is why our
freedom is not to be sought in spurious discussion on the conflict
between a style of life which we have no wish to reappraise and cir¬
cumstances suggestive of another: the real choice is that between our
whole character and our manner of being in the world. But either
this total choice is never mentioned, since it is the silent upsurge of
our being in the world, in which case it is not clear in what sense it
could be said to be ours, since this freedom glides over itself and is
the equivalent of a fate — or else our choice of ourselves is a genuine

* ‘avoir du champ’; in this sentence there is a play on the word ‘champ’ = field
(Translator’s note).

1 J. P. Sartre, V litre el le Neant, p. 562.

438

FREEDOM

choice, a conversion involving our whole existence. In this case,
however, there is presupposed a previous acquisition which the
choice sets out to modify and it founds a new tradition: this leads us
to ask whether the perpetual severance in terms of which we initially
defined freedom is not simply the negative aspect of our universal
commitment to a world, and whether our indifference to each deter¬
minate thing does not express merely our involvement in all; whether
the ready-made freedom from which we started is not reducible to a
power of initiative which cannot be transformed into doing without
taking up the world as posited in some shape or form, and whether,
in short, concrete and actual freedom is not to be found in this ex¬
change. It is true that nothing has significance and value for anyone
but me and through anyone but me, but this proposition remains in¬
determinate and is still indistinguishable from the Kantian idea of a
consciousness which ‘finds in things only what it has put into them’,
and from the idealist refutation of realism, as long as we fail to make
clear how we understand significance and the self. By defining our¬
selves as a universal power of Sinn-Gebung , we have reverted to the
method of the ‘thing without which5 and to the analytical reflection
of the traditional type, which seeks the conditions of possibility
without concerning itself with the conditions of reality. We must
therefore resume the analysis of the Sinngebung , and show how it can
be both centrifugal and centripetal, since it has been established that
there is no freedom without a field.

When I say that this rock is unclimbable, it is certain that this
attribute, like that of being big or little, straight and oblique, and
indeed like all attributes in general, can be conferred upon it only by
the project oficlimbing it, and by a human presence. It is, therefore,
freedom which brings into being the obstacles to freedom, so that the
latter can be set over against it as its bounds. However, it is clear that,
one and the same project being given, one rock will appear as an
obstacle, and another, being more negotiable, as a means. My free¬
dom, then, does not so contrive it that this way there is an obstacle,
and that.way a way through, it arranges for there to be obstacles and
ways through in general; it does not draw the particular outline of
this world, but merely lays down its general structures. It may be
objected that there is no difference; if my freedom conditions the
structure of the ‘there is5, that of the ‘here5 and the ‘there5, it is present
wherever these structures arise. We cannot distinguish the quality
of ‘obstacle5 from the obstacle itself, and relate one to freedom and
the other to the world in itself which, without freedom, would be
merely an amorphous and unnameable mass. It is not, therefore, out¬
side myself that I am able to find a limit to my freedom. But should I
not find it in myself? We must indeed distinguish between my express

439

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

intentions, for example the plan I now make to climb those moun¬
tains, and general intentions which evaluate the potentialities of my
environment. Whether or not I have decided to climb them, these
mountains appear high to me, because they exceed my body’s power
to take them in its stride, and, even if I have just read Micromegas , I
cannot so contrive it that they are small for me. Underlying myself as
a thinking subject, who am able to take my place at will on Sirius or
on the earth’s surface, there is, therefore, as it were a natural self
which does not budge from its terrestrial situation and which con¬
stantly adumbrates absolute valuations. What is more, my projects as
a thinking being are clearly modelled on the latter; if I elect to see
things from the point of view of Sirius, it is still to my terrestrial
experience that I must have recourse in order to do so; I may say, for
example, that the Alps are molehills . In so far as I have hands, feet,
a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent upon
my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way which I do
not choose. These intentions are general in a double sense: firstly in
the sense that they constitute a system in which all possible objects
are simultaneously included; if the mountain appears high and up¬
right, the tree appears small and sloping; and furthermore in the
sense that they are not of my own making, they originate from out¬
side me, and I am not surprised to find them in all psycho-physical
subjects organized as I am. Hence, as Gestalt psychology has shown,
there are for me certain shapes which are particularly favoured, as
they are for other men, and which are capable of giving rise to a
psychological science and rigorous laws. The grouping of dots

is always perceived as six pairs of dots with two millimetres between
each pair, while one figure is always perceived as a cube, and another
as a plane mosaic.1 It is as if, on the hither side of our judgement and
our freedom, someone were assigning such and such a significance to
such and such a given grouping. It is indeed true that perceptual
structures do not always force themselves upon the observer; there
are some winch are ambiguous. But these reveal even more effectively
the presence within us of spontaneous evaluation: for they are elusive
shapes which suggest constantly changing meanings to us. Now a
pure consciousness is capable of anything except being ignorant of
its intentions, and an absolute freedom cannot choose itself as hesi¬
tant, since that amounts to allowing itself to be drawn in several
directions, and since, the possibilities being ex hypothesi indebted to
freedom for all the strength they have, the weight that freedom gives
to one is thereby withdrawn from the rest. We can break up a shape

1 See above, p. 263.

440

FREEDOM

by looking at it awry, but this too is because freedom hses the gaze
along with its spontaneous evaluations. Without the latter, we
would not have a world, that is, a collection of things which emerge
from a background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our
body as ‘to be touched’, ‘to be taken’, ‘to be climbed over’. We
should never be aware of adjusting ourselves to things and reaching
them where they are, beyond us, but would be conscious only of re¬
stricting our thoughts to, the immanent objects of our intentions, and
we should not be in the world, ourselves implicated in the spectacle
and, so to speak, intermingled with things, we should simply enjoy
the spectacle of a universe. It is, therefore, true that there are no
obstacles in themselves, but the self which qualifies them as such is
not some acosmic subject; it runs ahead of itself in relation to things
in order to confer upon them the form of things. There is an auto¬
chthonous significance of the world which is constituted in the deal¬
ings which our incarnate existence has with it, and which provides
the ground of every deliberate Simgebtmg.

This is true not only of an impersonal and, generally speaking,
abstract function such as ‘external perception’. There is something
comparable present in all evaluations. It has been perceptively re¬
marked that pain and fatigue can never be regarded as causes which
‘act’ upon my liberty, and that, in so far as I may experience either at
any given moment, they do not have their origin outside me, but
always have a significance and express my attitude towards the world.
Pain makes me give way and say what I ought to have kept to myself,
fatigue makes me break my journey. We all know the moment at
which we decide no longer to endure pain or fatigue, and when,
simultaneously, they become intolerable in fact. Tiredness does not
halt my companion because he likes the clamminess of his body,
the heat of the road and the sun, in short, because he likes to feel
himself in the midst of things, to feel their rays converging upon
him, to be the cynosure of all this light, and an object of touch for the
earth’s crust. My own fatigue brings me to a halt because I dislike it,
because I have chosen differently my manner of being in the world,
because, for instance, I endeavour, not to be in nature, but rather to
win the recognition of others. I am free in relation to fatigue to pre¬
cisely the extent that I am free in relation to my being in the world,
free to make my way by transforming it.1 But here once more we
must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life : an attitude to¬
wards the world, when it has received frequent confirmation, acquires
a favoured status for us. Yet since freedom does not tolerate any
motive in its path, my habitual being in the world is at each moment
equally precarious, and the complexes which I have allowed to
1 J. P, Sartre, Ufctre et le Nfant, pp. 531 and ff.

441

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

develop over the years always remain equally soothing, and the free
act can with no difficulty blow them sky-high. However, having
built our life upon an inferiority complex which has been operative
vfor twenty years, it is not probable that we shall change. It is clear
what a summary rationalism might say in reply to such a hybrid
notion: there are no degrees of possibility; either the free act is no
longer possible, or it is still possible, in which case freedom is com¬
plete. In short, ‘probable’ is meaningless. It is a notion belonging to
statistical thought, which is not thought at all, since it does not con¬
cern any particular thing actually existing, any moment of time, any
concrete event. ‘It is improbable that Paul will give up writing bad
books’ means nothing, since Paul may well decide to write no more
such books. The probable is everywhere and nowhere, a reified
fiction, with only a psychological existence; it is not an ingredient of
the world. And yet we have already met it a little while ago in the
perceived world. The mountain is great or small to the extent that,
as a perceived thing, it is to be found in the field of my possible
actions, and in relation to a level which is not only that of my in¬
dividual life, but that of ‘any man’. Generality and probability are
not fictions, but phenomena; we must therefore find a phenomeno¬
logical basis for statistical thought. It belongs necessarily to a being
which is fixed, situated and surrounded by things in the world. ‘It is
improbable’ that I should at this moment destroy an inferiority
complex in which I have been content to live for twenty years. That
means that I have committed myself to inferiority, that I have made
it my abode, that this past, though not a fate, has at least a specific
weight and is not a set of events over there, at a distance from me,
but the atmosphere of my present. The rationalist’s dilemma: either
the free act is possible, or it is not — either the event originates in me
or is imposed on me from outside, does not apply to our relations
with the world and with our past. Our freedom does not destroy our
situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation is
open, which implies both that it calls up specially favoured modes of
resolution, and also that it is powerless to bring one into being by
itself.

We shall arrive at the same result by considering our relations with
history. Taking myself in my absolute concreteness, as I am pre¬
sented to myself in reflection, I find that I am an anonymous and
pre-human flux, as yet unqualified as, for instance, ‘a working man*
or ‘middle class’. If I subsequently think of myself as a man among
men, a bourgeois among bourgeois, this can be, it would seem, no
more than a second order view of myself ; I am never in my heart of
hearts a worker or a bourgeois, but a consciousness which freely
evaluates itself as a middle class or proletarian consciousness. And

442

FREEDOM

indeed, it is never the case that my objective position in the production)
process is sufficient to awaken class consciousness. There was ex¬
ploitation long before there were revolutionaries. Nor is it always in
periods of economic difficulty that the working class movement
makes headway. Revolt is, then, not the outcome of objective condi¬
tions, but it is rather the decision taken by the worker to will revolu¬
tion that makes a proletarian of him. The evaluation of the present
operates through one’s free project for the future. From which we
might conclude that history by itself has no significance, but only
that conferred upon it by our will. Yet here again we are slipping into
the method of The indispensable condition failing which . . in
opposition to objective thought, which includes the subject in its
deterministic system; we are setting idealist reflection which makes
determinism dependent upon the constituting activity of the subject.
Now, we have already seen that objective thought and analytical re¬
flection are two aspects of the same mistake, two ways of overlooking
the phenomena. Objective thought derives class consciousness from
the objective condition of the proletariat. Idealist reflection reduces
the proletarian condition to the awareness of it, which the proletarian
arrives at. The former traces class-consciousness to the class defined
in terms of objective characteristics, the latter on the other hand re¬
duces ‘being a workman’ to the consciousness of being one. In each
case we are in the realm of abstraction, because we remain torn be¬
tween the in itself and the for itself If we approach the question
afresh with the idea of discovering, not the causes of the act of be¬
coming aware, for there is no cause which can act from outside upon
a consciousness — nor the conditions of its possibility, for we need to
know the conditions which actually produce it — but class-conscious¬
ness itself, if, in short, we apply a genuinely existential method, what
do we find? I am not conscious of being working class or middle
class simply because, as a matter of fact, I sell my labour or, equally
as a matter of fact, because my interests are bound up with capitalism,
nor do I become one or the other on the day on which I elect to view
history in the light of the class struggle : what happens is that T exist
as working class’ or T exist as middle class’ in the first place, and it is
this mode of dealing with the world and society which provides both
the motives for my revolutionary or conservative projects and my
explicit judgements of the type: T am working class’ or ‘I am middle
class’, without its being possible to deduce the former from the latter,
or vice versa . What makes me a proletarian is not the economic sys¬
tem or society considered as systems of impersonal forces, but these
institutions as I carry them within me and experience them; nor is it
an intellectual operation devoid of motive, but my way of being in
the world within this institutional framework.

443

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BE1NG-IN-THE- WORLD

Let us suppose that I have a certain style of living, being at the
mercy of booms and slumps, not being free to do as I like, receiving a
weekly wage, having no control over either the conditions or the
products of my work, and consequently feeling a stranger in my
factory, my nation and my life. I have acquired the habit of reckoning
with a fatum , or appointed order, which I do not respect, but which I
have to humour. Or suppose that I work as a day-labourer, having
no farm of my own, no tools, going from one farm to another hiring
myself out at harvest time; in that case I have the feeling that there is
some anonymous power hovering over me and making a nomad of
me, even though I want to settle into a regular job. Or finally suppose
I am the tenant of a farm to which the owner has had no electricity
laid on, though the mains are less than two hundred yards away. I
have, for my family and myself, only one habitable room, although it
would be easy to make other rooms available in the house. My fellow
workers in factory or field, or other farmers, do the same work as I do
in comparable conditions; we co-exist in the same situation and feel
alike, not in virtue of some comparison, as if each one of us lived
primarily within himself, but on the basis of our tasks and gestures.
These situations do not imply any express evaluation, and if there is
a tacit evaluation, it represents the thrust of a freedom devoid of any
project against unknown obstacles; one cannot in any case talk about
a choice, for in all three cases it is enough that I should be born into
the world and that I exist in order to experience my life as full of
difficulties and constraints — I do not choose so to experience it. But
this state of affairs can persist without my becoming class-conscious,
understanding that I am of the proletariat and becoming a revolu¬
tionary. How then am I to make this change ? The worker learns that
other workers in a different trade have, after striking, obtained a
wage-increase, and notices that subsequently wages have gone up in
his own factory. The appointed order with which he was at grips is
beginning to take on a clearer shape. The day-labourer who has not
often seen workers in regular employment, who is not like them and
has little love for them, sees the price of manufactured goods and the
cost of living going up, and becomes aware that he can no longer earn
a livelihood. He may at this point blame town workers, in which case
class-consciousness will not make its appearance. If it does, it is not
because the day-labourer has decided to become a revolutionary and
consequently confers a value upon his actual condition; it is because
he has perceived, in a concrete way, that his life is synchronized with
the life of the town labourers and that all share a common lot. The
small farmer who does not associate himself with the day-labourers,
still less with the town labourers, being separated from them by a
whole world of customs and value judgements, nevertheless feels that

444

FREEDOM

he is on the same side as the journeyman when he pays them an
inadequate wage, and he even feels that he has something in common
with the town workers when he learns that the farm owner is chair¬
man of the board of directors of several industrial concerns. Social
space begins to acquire a magnetic field, and a region of the ex¬
ploited is seen to appear. At every pressure felt from any quarter of
the social horizon, the process of regrouping becomes clearly dis¬
cernible beyond ideologies and various occupations. Class is coming
into being, and we say that a situation is revolutionary when the con¬
nection objectively existing between the sections of the proletariat
(the connection, that is, which an absolute observer would recognize
as so existing) is finally experienced in perception as a common
obstacle to the existence of each and every one. It is not at all neces¬
sary that at any single moment a representation of revolution should
arise. For example, it is doubtful whether the Russian peasants of
1917 expressly envisaged revolution and the transfer of property.
Revolution arises day by day from the concatenation of less remote
and more remote ends. It is not necessary that each member of the
proletariat should think of himself as such, in the sense that a Marxist
theoretician gives to the word. It is sufficient that the journeyman or
the farmer should feel that he is on the march towards a certain cross¬
roads, to which the road trodden by the town labourers also leads.
Both find their journey’s end in revolution, which would perhaps
have terrified them had it been described and represented to them in
advance. One might say at the most that revolution is at the end of
the road they have taken and in their projects in the form of ‘things
must change’, which each one experiences concretely in his dis¬
tinctive difficulties and in the depths of his particular prejudices.
Neither the appointed order, nor the free act which destroys it, is
represented ; they are lived through in ambiguity. This does not mean
that workers and peasants bring about revolution without being
aware of it, and that we have here blind, ‘elementary forces’ cleverly
exploited by a few shrewd agitators. It is possibly in this light that the
prefect of police will view history. But such ways of seeing things do
not help him when faced with a genuine revolutionary situation, in
which the slogans of the alleged agitators are immediately under¬
stood, as if by some pre-established harmony, and meet with con¬
currence on all sides, because they crystallize what is latent in the
life of all productive workers. The revolutionary movement, like the
work of the artist, is an intention which itself creates its instruments
and its means of expression. The revolutionary project is not the re¬
sult of a deliberate judgement, or the explicit positing of an end. It is
these things in the case of the propagandist, because the propagandist
has been trained by the intellectual, or, in the case of the intellectual,

445

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

because he regulates his life on the basis of his thoughts. But it does
not cease to be the abstract decision of a thinker and become a
historical reality until it is worked out in the dealings men have with
each other, and in the relations of the man to his job. It is, therefore,
true that I recognize myself as a worker or a bourgeois on the day I
take my stand in relation to a possible revolution, and that this taking
of a stand is not the outcome, through some mechanical causality, of
my status as workman or bourgeois (which is why all classes have
their traitors), but neither is it an unwarranted evaluation, instan¬
taneous and unmotivated; it is prepared by some molecular process,
it matures in co-existence before bursting forth into words and being
related to objective ends. One is justified in drawing attention to the
fact that it is not the greatest poverty which produces the most clear¬
sighted revolutionaries, but one forgets to ask why a return of
prosperity frequently brings with it a more radical mood among the
masses. It is because the easing of living conditions makes a fresh
structure of social space possible: the horizon is not restricted to the
most immediate concerns, there is economic play and room for a
new project in relation to living. This phenomenon does not, then, go
to prove that the worker makes himself into worker and revolution¬
ary ex nihilo , but on the contrary that he does so on a certain basis of
co-existence. The mistake inherent in the conception under dis¬
cussion is, in general, that of disregarding all but intellectual projects,
instead of considering the existential project, which is the polarization
of a life towards a goal which is both determinate and indeterminate,
which, to the person concerned, is entirely unrepresented, and which
is recognized only on being attained. Intentionality is brought down
to the particular cases of the objectifying acts, the proletarian condi¬
tion is made an object of thought, and no difficulty is experienced in
showing, in accordance with idealism’s permanent method, that, like
every other object of thought, it subsists only before and through the
consciousness which constitutes it as an object. Idealism (like objec¬
tive thought) passes by the side of true intentionality, of which it is
true to say that it belongs to its object rather than that it posits it.
Idealism overlooks the interrogative, the subjunctive, the aspiration,
the expectation, the positive indeterminacy of these modes of con¬
sciousness, for it is acquainted only with consciousness in the present
or future indicative, which is why it fails to account for class. For
class is a matter neither for observation nor decree; like the appointed
order of the capitalistic system, like revolution, before being thought
it is lived through as an obsessive presence, as possibility, enigma and
myth. To make class-consciousness the outcome of a decision and a
choice is to say that problems are solved on the day they are posed,
that every question already contains the reply that it awaits; it is, in

446

FREEDOM

short, to revert to immanence and abandon the attempt to under¬
stand history. In reality, the intellectual project and the positing of
ends are merely the bringing to completion of an existential project.
It is I who give a direction, significance and future to my life, but that
does not mean that these are concepts; they spring from my present
and past and in particular from my mode of present and past co¬
existence. Even in the case of the intellectual who turns revolutionary,
his decision does not arise ex nihilo; it may follow upon a prolonged
period of solitude: the intellectual is in search of a doctrine which
shall make great demands on him and cure him of his subjectivity;
or he may yield to the clear light thrown by a Marxist interpretation
of history, in which case he has given knowledge pride of place in his
life, and that in itself is understandable only in virtue of his past and
his childhood. Even the decision to become a revolutionary without
motive, and by an act of pure freedom would express a certain way of
being in the natural and social world, which is typically that of the
intellectual. He ‘throws in his lot with the working class’ from the
starting point of his situation as an intellectual and from nowhere
else (and this is why even fideism, in his case, remains rightly suspect).
Now with the worker it is a fortiori the case that his decision is
elaborated in the course of his life. This time it is through no mis¬
understanding that the horizon of a particular life and revolutionary
aims coincide : for the worker revolution is a more immediate possi¬
bility, and one closer to his own interests than for the intellectual,
since he is at grips with the economic system in his very life. For this
reason there are, statistically, more workers than middle class people
in a revolutionary party. Motivation, of course, does not do away
with freedom. Working class parties of the most unmistakable kind
have had many intellectuals among their leaders, and it is likely that
a man such as Lenin identified himself with revolution and eventually
transcended the distinction between intellectual and worker. But
these are the virtues proper to action and commitment; at the outset,
I am not an individual beyond class, I am situated in a social en¬
vironment, and my freedom, though it may have the power to com¬
mit me elsewhere, has not the power to transform me instantane¬
ously into what I decide to be. Thus to be a bourgeois or a worker is
not only to be aware of being one or the other, it is to identify one¬
self as worker or bourgeois through an implicit or existential project
which merges into our way of patterning the world and co-existing
with other people. My decision draws together a spontaneous mean¬
ing of my life which it may confirm or repudiate, but not annul. Both
idealism and objective thinking fail to pin down the coming into being
of class consciousness, the former because it deduces actual existence
from consciousness, the latter because it derives consciousness from

447

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING -IN-THE-WORLD

de facto existence, and both because they overlook the relationship
of motivation.

It will perhaps be objected, from the idealist side, that I am not,
for myself, a particular project, but a pure consciousness, and that
the attributes of bourgeois or worker belong to me only to the extent
that I place myself among others, and see myself through their eyes,
from the outside, as ‘another’. Here we should have categories of For
Others and not For Oneself. But if there were two sorts of categories,
how could I have the experience of another, that is, of an alter egol
This experience presupposes that already my view of myself is half¬
way to having the quality of a possible ‘other’, and that in my view of
another person is implied his quality as ego. It will be replied that the
other person is given to me as a fact, and not as a possibility of my
own being. What is meant by this? Is it that I should not have the
experience of other men if there were none on the earth’s surface?
The proposition is self-evidently true, but does not solve our problem
since, as Kant has already said, we cannot pass from ‘All knowledge
begins with experience’ to ‘All knowledge derives from experience’.
If the other people who empirically exist are to be, for me, other
people, I must have a means of recognizing them, and the structures
of the For Another must, therefore, already be the dimensions of the
For Oneself. Moreover, it is impossible to derive from the For
Another all the specifications of which we are speaking. Another per¬
son is not necessarily, is not even ever quite an object for me. And, in
sympathy for example, I can perceive another person as bare exist¬
ence and freedom as much or as little as myself. The-other-person-as-
objcct is nothing but an insincere modality of others, just as absolute
subjectivity is nothing but an abstract notion of myself. I must,
therefore, in the most radical reflection, apprehend around my
absolute individuality a kind of halo of generality or a kind of atmo¬
sphere of ‘sociality’. This is necessary if subsequently the words ‘a
bourgeois’ and ‘a man’ are to be able to assume meaning for me. I
must apprehend myself immediately as centred in a way outside my¬
self, and my individual existence must diffuse round itself, so to
speak, an existence in quality. The For-Themselves — me for myself
and the other for himself — must stand out against a background of
For Others — I for the other and the other for me. My life must have a
significance which I do not constitute; there must strictly speaking
be an intersubjectivity; each one of us must be both anonymous in
the sense of absolutely individual, and anonymous in the sense of
absolutely general. Our being in the world, is the concrete bearer of
this double anonymity.

Provided that this is so, there can be situations, a direction* of
* ‘sens’ (Translator’s note).

448

FREEDOM

history, and a historical truth: three ways of saying the same thing.
If indeed I made myself into a worker or a bourgeois by an absolute
initiative, and if in general terms nothing ever courted our freedom,
history would display no structure, no event would be seen to take
shape in it, and anything might emerge from anything else. There
would be no British Empire as a relatively stable historical form to
which a name can be given, and in which certain probable properties
are recognizable. There would not be, in the history of social progress,
revolutionary situations or periods of set-back. A social revolution
would be equally possible at any moment, and one might reasonably
expect a despot to undergo conversion to anarchism. History would
never move in any direction, nor would it be possible to say that even
over a short period of time events were conspiring to produce any
definite outcome. The statesman would always be an adventurer,
that is to say, he would take advantage of events by conferring upon
them a meaning which they did not have. Now if it is true that history
is powerless to complete anything independently of consciousnesses
which assume it and thereby decide its course, and if consequently it
can never be detached from us to play the part of an alien force using
us for its own ends, then precisely because it is always history lived
through we cannot withhold from it at least a fragmentary meaning.
Something is being prepared which will perhaps come to nothing but
which may, for the moment, conform to the adumbrations of the
present. Nothing can so order it that, in the France of 1799, a military
power ‘above classes’ should not appear as a natural product of the
ebb of revolution, and that the role of military dictator should not
here be ‘a part that has to be played’. It is Bonaparte’s project, known
to us through its realization, which causes us to pass such a judge¬
ment. But before Bonaparte, Dumouriez, Custine and others had en¬
visaged it, and this common tendency has to be accounted for. What
is known as the significance of events is not an idea which produces
them, or the fortuitous result of their occurring together. It is the
concrete project of a future which is elaborated within social co¬
existence and in the One * before any personal decision is made. At
the point of revolutionary history to which class dynamics had
carried it by 1799, when neither the Revolution could be carried for¬
ward nor the clock put back, the situation was such that, all due
reservations as to individual freedom having been made, each in¬
dividual, through the functional and generalized existence which
makes a historical subject of him, tended to fall back upon what had
been acquired. It would have been a historical mistake at that stage to
suggest to them either a resumption of the methods of revolutionary
government or a reversion to the social conditions of 1789, not
* In the sense of Das Man , the impersonal pronoun (Translator’s note).

449

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

because there is a truth of history independent of our projects and
evaluations, which are always free, but because there is an average
and statistical significance of these projects. Which means that we
confer upon history its significance, but not without its putting that
significance forward itself. The Sinngebung is not merely centrifugal,
which is why the subject of history is not the individual. There is an
exchange between generalized and individual existence, each receiv¬
ing and giving something. There is a moment at which the significance
which was foreshadowed in the One, and which was merely a pre¬
carious possibility threatened by the contingency of history, is taken
up by an individual. It may well happen that now, having taken com¬
mand of history, he leads it, for a time at least, far beyond what
seemed to comprise its significance, and involves it in a fresh dia¬
lectic, as when Bonaparte, from being Consul, made himself Emperor
and conqueror. We are not asserting that history from end to end has
only one meaning, any more than has an individual life. We mean
simply that in any case freedom modifies it only by taking up the
meaning which history was offering at the moment in question, and
by a kind of unobtrusive assimilation. On the strength of this pro¬
posal made by the present, the adventurer can be distinguished from
the statesman, historical imposture from the truth of an epoch, with
the result that our assessment of the past, though never arriving at
absolute objectivity, is at the same time never entitled to be arbitrary.

We therefore recognize, around our initiatives and around that
strictly individual project which is oneself, a zone of generalized
existence and of projects already formed, significances which trail
between ourselves and things and which confer upon us the quality of
man, bourgeois or worker. Already generality intervenes, already our
presence to ourselves is mediated by it and we cease to be pure con¬
sciousness, as soon as the natural or social constellation ceases to be
an unformulated this and crystallizes into a situation, as soon as it
has a meaning — in short, as soon as we exist. Every thing appears to
us through a medium to which it lends its own fundamental quality;
this piece of wood is neither a collection of colours and tactile data,
not even their total Gestalt , but something from which there emanates
a woody essence; these ‘sense-data’ modulate a certain theme or
illustrate a certain style which is the wood itself, and which creates,
round this piece of wood and the perception I have of it, a horizon of
significance. The natural world, as we have seen, is nothing other
than the place of all possible themes and styles. It is indissolubly an
unmatched individual and a significance. Correspondingly, the
generality and the individuality of the subject, subjectivity qualified
and pure, the anonymity of the One and the anonymity of conscious¬
ness are not two conceptions of the subject between which philosophy

450

FREEDOM

has to choose, but two stages of a unique structure which is the con¬
crete subject. Let us consider, for example, sense experience. I lose
myself in this red which is before me, without in any way qualifying
it, and it seems that this experience brings me into contact with a
pre-human subject. Who perceives this red ? It is nobody who can be
named and placed among other perceiving subjects. For, between
this experience of red which I have, and that about which other
people speak to me, no direct comparison will ever be possible. I am
here in my own point of view, and since all experience, in so far as it
derives from impression, is in the same way strictly my own, it seems
that a unique and unduplicated subject enfolds them all. Suppose I
formulate a thought, the God of Spinoza, for example; this thought
as it is in my living experience is a certain landscape to which no one
will ever have access, even if, moreover, I manage to enter into a dis¬
cussion with a friend on the subject of Spinoza’s God. However, the
very individuality of these experiences is not quite unadulterated. For
the thickness of this red, its thisness, the power it has of reaching me
and saturating me, are attributable to the fact that it requires and
obtains from my gaze a certain vibration, and imply that I am
familiar with a world of colours of which this one is a particular
variation. The concrete colour red, therefore, stands out against a
background of generality, and this is why, even without transferring
myself to another’s point of view, I grasp myself in perception as a
perceiving subject, and not as unclassifiable consciousness. I feel, all
round my perception of red, all the regions of my being unaffected by
it, and that region set aside for colours, ‘vision’, through which the
perception finds its way into me. Similarly my thought about the
God of Spinoza is only apparently a strictly unique experience, for it
is the concretion of a certain cultural world, the Spinozist philosophy,
or of a certain philosophic style in which I immediately recognize a
‘Spinozist’ idea. There is therefore no occasion to ask ourselves why
the thinking subject or consciousness perceives itself as a man, or an
incarnate or historical subject, nor must we treat this apperception as
a second order operation which it somehow performs starting from
its absolute existence : the absolute flow takes shape beneath its own
gaze as ‘ a consciousness’, or a man, or an incarnate subject, because
it is a field of presence — to itself, to others and to the world — and
because this presence throws it into the natural and cultural world
from which it arrives at an understanding of itself. We must not en¬
visage this flux as absolute contact with oneself, as an absolute
density with no internal fault, but on the contrary as a being which is
in pursuit of itself outside. If the subject made a constant and at all
times peculiar choice of himself, one might wonder why his experi¬
ence always ties up with itself and presents him with objects and
2H 451

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

definite historical phases, why we have a general notion of time valid
through all times, and why finally the experience of each one of us
links up with that of others. But it is the question itself which must be
questioned : for what is given, is not one fragment of time followed by
another, one individual flux, then another; it is the taking up of each
subjectivity by itself, and of subjectivities by each other in the general¬
ity of a single nature, the cohesion of an intersubjective life and a
world. The present mediates between the For Oneself and the For
Others, between individuality and generality. True reflection presents
me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical
with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it:
I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body
and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and
this situation, and through them, all the rest.

What, then, becomes of the freedom we spoke about at the outset,
if this point of view is taken? I can no longer pretend to be a cipher,
and to choose myself continually from the starting point of nothing
at all. If it is through subjectivity that nothingness appears in the
world, it can equally be said that it is through the world that nothing¬
ness comes into being. I am a general refusal to be anything, accom¬
panied surreptitiously by a continual acceptance of such and such a
qualified form of being. For even this general refusal is still one manner
of being , and has its place in the world . It is true that I can at any mo¬
ment interrupt my projects. But what is this power? It is the power to
begin something else, for we never remain suspended in nothingness.
We are always in a plenum, in being, just as a face, even in repose,
even in death, is always doomed to express something (there are
people whose faces, in death, bear expressions of surprise, or peace,
or discretion), and just as silence is still a modality of the world of
sound. I may defy all accepted form, and spurn everything, for there
is no case in which I am utterly committed : but in this case I do not
withdraw into my freedom, I commit myself elsewhere. Instead of
thinking about my bereavement, I look at my nails, or have lunch, or
engage in politics. Far from its being the case that my freedom is
always unattended, it is never without an accomplice, and its power of
perpetually tearing itself away finds its fulcrum in my universal com¬
mitment in the world. My actual freedom is not on the hither side of
my being, but before me, in things. We must not say that I continu¬
ally choose myself, on the excuse that I might continually refuse what
I am. Not to refuse is not the same thing as to choose. We could
identify drift and action only by depriving the implicit of all pheno¬
menal value, and at every instant arraying the world before us in per¬
fect transparency, that is, by destroying the world’s ‘worldliness’.
Consciousness holds itself responsible for everything, and takes

452

FREEDOM

everything upon itself, but it has nothing of its own and makes its
life in the world. We are led to conceive freedom as a choice continu¬
ally remade as long as we do not bring in the notion of a generalized
or natural time. We have seen that there is no natural time, if we
understand thereby a time of things without subjectivity. There is,
however, at least a generalized time, and this is what the common no¬
tion of time envisages. It is the perpetual reiteration of the sequence
of past, present and future. It is, as it were, a constant disappoint¬
ment and failure. This is what is expressed by saying that it is con¬
tinuous: the present which it brings to us is never a present for good,
since it is already over when it appears, and the future has, in it, only
the appearance of a goal towards which we make Our way, since it
quickly comes into the present, whereupon we turn towards a fresh
future. This time is the time of our bodily functions, which like it, are
cyclic, and it is also that of nature with which we co-exist. It offers us
only the adumbration and the abstract form of a commitment, since
it continually erodes itself and undoes that which it has just done. As
long as we place in opposition, with no mediator, the For Itself and
the In Itself, and fail to perceive, between ourselves and the world,
this natural foreshadowing of a subjectivity, this prepersonal time
which rests upon itself, acts are needed to sustain the upsurge of time,
and everything becomes equally a matter of choice, the respiratory
reflex no less than the moral decision, conservation no less than
creation. As far as we are concerned, consciousness attributes this
power of universal constitution to itself only if it ignores the event
which upholds it and is the occasion of its birth. A consciousness for
which the world ‘can be taken for granted’, which finds it ‘already
constituted’ and present even in consciousness itself, does not
absolutely choose either its being or its manner of being.

What then is freedom? To be born is both to be born of the world
and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but
also never completely constituted ; in the first case we are acted upon,
in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But
this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at once . There
is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am
never a thing and never bare consciousness. In fact, even our own
pieces of initiative, even the situations which we have chosen, bear
us on, once they have been entered upon by virtue of a state rather
than an act. The generality of the ‘role’ and of the situation comes to
the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and
the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the
‘share contributed by the situation’ and the ‘share, contributed by
freedom’. Let us suppose that a man is tortured to make him talk.
If he refuses to give the names and addresses which it is desired to

453

BFJNG-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

extract from him, this does not arise from a solitary and unsupported
decision: the man still feels himself to be with his comrades, and,
being still involved in the common struggle, he is as it were incapable
of talking. Or else, for months or years, he has, in his mind, faced this
test and staked his whole life upon it. Or finally, he wants to prove,
by coming through it, what he has always thought and said about
freedom. These motives do not cancel out freedom, but at least en¬
sure that it does not go unbuttressed in being. What withstands pain
is not, in short, a bare consciousness, but the prisoner with his com¬
rades or with those he loves and under whose gaze he lives ; or else the
awareness of his proudly willed solitude, which again is a certain
mode of the Mit-Sein. And probably the individual in his prison
daily reawakens these phantoms, which give back to him the strength
he gave to them. But conversely, in so far as he has committed him¬
self to this action, formed a bond with his comrades or adopted this
morality, it is because the historical situation, the comrades, the
world around him seemed to him to expect that conduct from him.
The analysis could be pursued endlessly in this way. We choose our
world and the world chooses us. What is certain, in any case, is that
we can at no time set aside within ourselves a redoubt to which being
does not find its way through, without seeing this freedom, immedi¬
ately and by the very fact of being a living experience, take on the
appearance of being and become a motive and a buttress. Taken con¬
cretely, freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer — even
the prehuman and prehistoric freedom with which we began — and it
shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to
the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional
data of our lives. There is, as Husserl says, on the one hand a ‘field of
freedom’ and on the other a ‘conditioned freedom’;1 not that free¬
dom is absolute within the limits of this field and non-existent outside
it (like the perceptual field, this one has no traceable boundaries),
but because I enjoy immediate and remote possibilities. Our commit¬
ments sustain our power and there is no freedom without some
power. Our freedom, it is said, is either total or non-existent. This
dilemma belongs to objective thought and its stable-companion,
analytical reflection. If indeed we place ourselves within being, it must
necessarily be the case that our actions must have their origin outside
us, and if we revert to constituting consciousness, they must originate
within. But we have learnt precisely to recognize the order of phe¬
nomena. We are involved in the world and with others in an in¬
extricable tangle. The idea of situation rules out absolute freedom at
the source of our commitments, and equally, indeed, at their terminus.
No commitment, not even commitment in the Hegelian State, can
1 Fink, Vergegenwartigung unci Bild, p. 285.

454

FREEDOM

make me leave behind all differences and free me for anything. This
universality itself, from the mere fact of its being experienced, would
stand out as a particularity against the world’s background, for exis¬
tence both generalizes and particularizes everything at which it aims,
and cannot ever be finally complete.

The synthesis of in itself and for itself which brings Hegelian free¬
dom into being has, however, its truth. In a sense, it is the very
definition of existence, since it is effected at every moment before our
eyes in the phenomenon of presence, only to bfc quickly re-enacted,
since it does not conjure away our finitude. By taking up a present, I
draw together and transform my past, altering its significance, freeing
and detaching myself from it. But I do so only by committing myself
somewhere else. Psychoanalytical treatment does not bring about its
cure by producing direct awareness of the past, but in the first place
by binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relation¬
ships. It is not a matter of giving scientific assent to the psychoanalyt¬
ical interpretation, and discovering a notional significance for the
past; it is a matter of reliving this or that as significant, and this the
patient succeeds in doing only by seeing his past in the perspective of
his co-existence with the doctor. The complex is not dissolved by a
non-instrumental freedom, but rather displaced by a new pulsation
of time with its own supports and motives. The same applies in all
cases of cominjj to awareness: they are real only if they are sustained
by a new commitment. Now this commitment too is entered into in
the sphere of the implicit, and is therefore valid only for a certain
temporal cycle. The choice which we make of our life is always based
on a certain givenness. My freedom can draw life away from its
spontaneous course, but only by a series of unobtrusive deflections
which necessitate first of all following its course — not by any abso¬
lute creation. All explanations of my conduct in terms of my past, my
temperament and my environment are therefore true, provided that
they be regarded not as separable contributions, but as moments of
my total being, the significance of which I am entitled to make ex¬
plicit in various ways, without its ever being possible to say whether
I confer their meaning upon them or receive it from them. I am a
psychological and historical structure, and have received, with
existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts
stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher’s
thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world,
and what he is. The fact remains that I am free, not in spite of, or on
the hither side of, these motivations, but by means of them. For this
significant life, this certain significance of nature and history which
I am, does not limit my access to the world, but on the contrary is
my means of entering into communication with it. It is by being

455

BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND BEING-IN-THE- WORLD

unrestrictedly and unreservedly what I am at present that I have a
chance of moving forward; it is by living my time that I am able to
understand other times, by plunging into the present and the world,
by taking on deliberately what I am fortuitously, by willing what I
will and doing what I do, that I can go further. I can pass freedom
by, only if I try to get over my natural and social situation by refusing,
in the first place, to take it up, instead of using it as a way into the
natural and human world. Nothing determines me from outside, not
because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am
from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true
through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging
to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that
things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves. We need have no
fear that our choices or actions restrict our liberty, since choice and
action alone cut us loose from our anchorage. Just as reflection bor¬
rows its wish for absolute sufficiency from the perception which
causes a thing to appear, and as in this way idealism tacitly uses that
‘primary opinion’ which it would like to destroy as opinion, so free¬
dom flounders in the contradictions of commitment, and fails to
realize that, without the roots which it thrusts into the world, it
would not be freedom at all. Shall I make this promise? Shall I risk
my life for so little ? Shall I give up my liberty in order to save liberty ?
There is no theoretical reply to these questions. But there are these
things which stand, irrefutable, there is before you this person whom
you love, there are these men whose existence around you is that of
slaves, and your freedom cannot be willed without leaving behind its
singular relevance, and without willing freedom for all Whether it is
a question of things or of historical situations, philosophy has no
function other than to teach us once more to see them clearly, and
it is true to say that it comes into being by destroying itself as separate
philosophy. But what is here required is silence, for only the hero
lives out his relation to men and the world. ‘Your son is caught in
the fire; you are the one who will save him. ... If there is an ob¬
stacle, you would be ready to give your shoulder provided only that
you can charge down that obstacle. Your abode is your act itself.
Your act is you. . . . You give yourself in exchange. . . . Your sig¬
nificance shows itself, effulgent. It is your duty, your hatred, your
love, your steadfastness, your ingenuity. . . . Man is but a network of
relationships, and these alone matter to him.’1

1 A. de Saint-Exup6ry, Pilot e de Guerre f pp. 171 and 174.

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— —Vision without inversion of the retinal image , ibid., 1897.

- The spatial harmony of touch and sight. Mind, 1899.

straus (e.), Vom Sinn der Sinne , Berlin, Springer, 1935.

WERNER, Grundfragm der Intensistdtspsychologie, Ztschr. f. Psychologies
Ergzbd, 10, 1922.

- Uberdie Amprdgung von Tongestalten, Ztschr. fttr Psychologie, 1926.

- Untersuchungen iiber Empfindung und Empfinden, I and II: Die Rolle

der Sprachempfindung im Prozess der Gestaltung ausdrucksmdssig
erlebter Worter, ibid., 1930.

werner and zietz, Die dynamische Struktur der Bewegung, ibid,, 1927.

WERTHEIMER, Experimented Studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegung, Ztschr
f. Ps. 1912.

- Oher das Denken der Namrvolker and Die Schiussprozesse im produk-

tiven Denken, in Dret Abhandf ungen zur Gestalt theorie, Erlangen, 1925,

VAN WOERKOM, Sur la notion de tespace (le sens giometrique). Revue
neurologique, 1910.

wolff (w.), Selbstbeurteilung und Fremdbeurteilung in wissentlichen und -
unwissentlichen Versuch , Psychologische Forschung, 1932.

young (p. t.), Auditory localization with acoustical transposition of the ears ,

" Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1928.

zucker, Experimenteiies uber Sinnestduschungen , Archiv f. Psychiatric
und Nervenkranklieiten, 1928.

462

INDEX

Ackermann, 306n
Adam, 291
affectivity, 154fF
agnosia, 126 and n

Alain, 27n, 3 In, 33n, 34n, 45n, 46n,
56n, 167, 230n, 267, 335, 336n, 337n
alexia, 195
allocheiria, 98, 99
amnesia, 193
analogy, 128
analysis, existential, 136
anarthria, 175
anorexia, 164

anosognosia, 76, 80-1, 148f
aphasia, 126, 175, 190ff
appearance, and reality, 294ff
apraxia, 126 and n, 138-9n, 139
a priori , 220f
arc, intentional, 136
Aristotle, 205, 359
association of ideas, 17ff
attention, 6, 26ff
Augustine, St., x-xi n, 412

background of movement, 111
Balzac, H. de, xxi, 190, 197-8
Beauvoir, Simone de, 382n
Becker, lOln

‘being’ and ‘having’, 174 and n
Benary, 114n, 128n, 132n, 133n, 134n,
135n, 196n

Bergson, Henri, 19n, 57, 58, 59, 62, 78,
78-9n, 142n, 180, 181, 236n, 263,
276n, 380, 412, 413n, 415n, 420
Berkeley, G., 254-6, 318, 320
Bernard, E., 323 and n
Binswanger, L., 1 60n, 1 61n, 1 63n,
164n, 166n, 285n, 286n, 290n, 294n
body, objective and phenomenal, 105fF
body image, 98ff, 141
Bofe^Art, van, 148n
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 449-50
Bouman, 121n, 141n, 190n

Broca, 194, 195n

Brunschvicg, 19n, 54n, 56n, 115n, 394
Burger-Prinz, lOOn
Buytendijk and Plessner, 232n

Casanova, 159

Cassirer, E., 28n, 53, 124-5 and n,
127n, 148n, 182n, 192n, 235n, 290n,
291 n

categorization, failure of, 176, 192
CSzanne, Paul, xxi, 132n, 150, 197,

198, 260, 262 and n, 318, 322, 323,
330

Chevalier, 145n
class-consciousness, 442ff
Claudel, Paul, 389n, 410, 419n
Cogito, Descartes’, ix, 369ff
colours: and motor reactions, 209ff;
naming, 175-6, 191f; perception of,
304ff; visual injury and perception
of, 74; young child and, 29-30
comprehension and intellection, xviii
Comte, Auguste, 290, 292
Conrad-Martius, H., 319n
consciousness, ix, xv-xvii; and atten¬
tion, 26ff; and body, 124; teleology
of, xvii

constancy, 313ff; hypothesis, 7-8, 26,
46, 58, 228
Corbin, H., 424n
cube, 203ff; ‘seeing’ a, 262ff
Custine, 449
Czermak, 205n

Darwin, Charles, 194
D6jean, R., 8n, 23 In, 232n
depth, invisibility of, 254ff
Descartes, R., ix, 27, 32n, 40, 42, 43-5,
49-50, 71n, 88, 95, 121n, 148, 198,

199, 257, 332, 351, 355, 369-72, 375,
376, 396, 399, 400-2, 437

Diderot, 104n
diplopia, 206

doubt, 382tf, 399f
Dumouriez, 449
Duncker, 278n

Ebbinghaus, 19n
economics, 171-3n
ek-stase, 70* 419, 427
empiricism, 23-4
engrain, 195n

essences, phenomenology and, vii, xiv
eternity, 372ff, 393, 422ff
Euclid, 273, 391, 394, 396
experience error, 5

Fabrice {La Chartreuse de Parme\ 362,
363 and n

field: of sensations, 216; transcen¬
dental, 61 : of vision, 5
figure-background structure, 13, 101
Fink, E., xiii, 31n, 51n, 295n, 418n,
454n

Fischel, 313n

Fischer, 136n, 282n, 283n, 287n
form and content, 127
Freud, S., viii, 158 and n, 160, 162n,
168, 172n, 180

Gasquet, J., 132n, 197n, 198n, 262n,
318n, 323n

gaze, 67ff, 226-7, 310
Gelb, lOn, 119n, 226n, 227n, 305n,
307n, 308n, 311n, 312n
Gelb and Goldstein, 103n, 113-14n,
116n, 119n, 120n, 121n, 122n, 176n,
191n, 192n, 193n, 266n, 307n
Gestalten, 60f

Gestalt psychology, 47fF, 50-1 n
Gestaltung, 45n
gestures, 184ff, 194
gnosia, 125n
Goethe, 210 and n

Goldstein, 103n, 104n, 105n, 107n,
108n, llOn, 11 In, 116n, 117-18,
119n, 123n, 138n, 141n, 182n, 190n,
194n, 195n, 196n

Goldstein and Rosenthal, 209n, 210n
Gottschaldt, 18n

grasping and pointing, 103f, 122ff,
see also Zeigen and Greifen
Griinbaum, lOln, 121n, 140n, 141n,
142n, 143n, 190n, 191n, 195n
Guillaume, lln, 47n, 96n, 257n, 309n
Gurwitsch, A., 47n, 384n
Gusdorf, G., xxi n

INDEX

habit, 142ff, 152
hallucination, 334ff
Head, 29, 98n, 99n, 121n, 140n, 141,
143n, 190n, 195n
heautoscopy, 205f

Hegel, viii, xviii, 127n, 215, 240, 241,
355, 454, 455

Heidegger, vii, viii, xiv, 70n, 407n, 410,
412n, 418, 419, 420 and n, 421n, 422,
425n, 426n, 427, 430n, 432
Helmholz, 33n
Heraclitus, 411
Herder, 52, 235, 238
Hering, 12n, 20 and n, 304n, 306, 307n
history, xix, 87f, 448ff
Hobbes, T., 32n

Hochheimer, 114n, 131n, 132n, 134n,
135n, 136n
Holmes, 140n

horizon, see point-horizon structure
von Hombostel, 313n
Hume, David, 32n, 220
Husserl, E., vii-viii, x-xvii, xix-xxi,
13n, 15n, 3 In, 32n, 40n, 49n, 50n,
60n, 71n, 92n, 93n, 121n, 127n, 152n,
179n, 21 9n, 220, 241, 243n, 265 and
n, 274n, 276n, 294, 295, 343n, 363n,
365n, 376n, 395n, 396 and n, 398n,
406, 416 and n, 417, 418 and n, 419,
422n, 425, 426 and n, 428 and n,
429n, 434n, 454

idea, 71

illusion, Aristotle’s, 205; and memory,
20f; and perception, 294ff
impression, sensation and, 4
indeterminacy, principle of, 169
induction, psychological, 115
intellectualism, 26ff, 39, 46
intentionality, xvii-xviii, 137, 243ff; of
act and operative, xviii
inversion, visual, 244fF

Jaensch, 12n
James, William, 79n
Janet, P., 78, 79n
Jaspers, K., 7n, 206n, 335n
judgement, 32ff

Kaila, lOOn

Kandinsky, W., 210 and n
Kant, ix, x, xiii, xvii, 17, 31n, 32n, 43,
53, 61, 62, 105, 114, 121n, 127n, 129,
148, 177, 192, 218, 219, 220, 243,

464

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